


For Want of a Nail

by Antarctica_or_bust



Series: To Rewrite History [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Adjusting to the future is hard, Aka - this one is gonna hurt, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Dystopia, And Bucky benefits, Angst, Awesome Peggy, BAMF Natasha Romanov, BAMF Peggy Carter, Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky has skills, Bucky is not happy about losing his arm, Character Death, Crack and Angst, Epic Battles, F/M, Fic Spans Years, Genocide, Grief/Mourning, Howard Stark is actually a decent parent, Humor, Hydra (Marvel), Insecurity, Lots of Minor Character Death, M/M, Major Character Injury, Mutual Pining, Natasha is Not Impressed, POV Bucky Barnes, POV Multiple, POV Natasha, POV Steve Rogers, POV Tony, Presumed Dead Steve Rogers, Protective Bucky Barnes, Protective Natasha, Protective Steve Rogers, Pseudoscience, Red Skull takes over the world, SHIELD, Seriously this is war - lots and lots of people die, Sexual Content, Snark, Some people don't get happy endings, Steve Feels, Steve finally gets the gay sex talk, Tesseract, Tony Being Tony, Tony Stark is a Shipper, Training, Winning at a price, Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes, pre-SHIELD, some things never change, the one where Hydra wins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-26
Updated: 2015-02-10
Packaged: 2018-02-10 12:45:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 41,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2025579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Antarctica_or_bust/pseuds/Antarctica_or_bust
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hydra wins the war and then the world.  Seventy years later, the Resistance has a plan to win it back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Fire

**Author's Note:**

> I chose not to put warnings on this fic to avoid spoiling several key parts of the story so read at your own risk. However, if you’re really worried about being triggered or just don’t like surprises, the warnings you would have gotten can be found in the end notes for this fic.
> 
> I've also finally given this fic a rewrite so it should flow better now. If anyone actually prefers the original version, you can still find that on my livejournal.

_For want of a nail the shoe was lost._  
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.  
For want of a horse the rider was lost.  
For want of a rider the message was lost.  
For want of a message the battle was lost.  
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.  
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

  
-Historical Proverb of unknown origin; 14th century

 

When Captain America and his sergeant fell from a train high in the mountains, the war machine just kept on turning anyway. Why should the Allies care about a single pair of soldiers, even if one had far more strength than normal men? Why would the Third Reich take notice of one small skirmish when entire armies were camped upon its doorstep and the fighting showed no signs of slowing down?

But they should have cared because without Steve Rogers there to stop him, the Red Skull rained down fire upon six continents. Every major city in Europe, Africa, and Asia disappeared within the hour while those in Australia and the Americas did not live to see the dawn. Where there had once been life, Hydra’s bombs left smoking craters; where there had once been choice, the Red Skull ruled supreme.

He remade the world in the image of his madness and nothing would ever be the same again.

\---

Hydra took Europe first since the Red Skull’s soldiers were ready and waiting when the destruction started, black-clad armies marching across the continent as triumphant conquerors. They promised order in the midst of chaos and so they were hailed as heroes by thousands of terrified survivors, people who just wanted their lives put right again.

One could hardly blame them when the final death toll numbered more than a billion and there was no one left to warn the world of Hydra’s true intent.

The soldiers who had fought against the Red Skull were the first to disappear, the greatest heroes on both sides slaughtered in the night. For Hydra cared nothing about national boundaries or the vagaries of history; all it required was people who would kneel.

The Red Skull wanted servants and enforcers and he found the latter amongst the shell-shocked soldiers who slowly staggered back to their homes and families. Most of these men found nothing but wreckage where their lives had been and they were in no shape to doubt Hydra when its leaders promised peace. Such soldiers swelled the ranks of the Red Skull’s armies, every loyal lieutenant suddenly commanding hundreds willing to fight in Hydra's name.

Although, in truth, there was little resistance to the world's new rulers amongst the general populace. Obedience was comforting in the face of genocide and the old lines on the map were quickly swept away beneath the unyielding boot heel of order over all.

The Red Skull built an empire with himself as god, king, and executioner, and within a generation people forgot that there had ever been another way. Hydra was the beginning of recorded history, the beginning of civilization, and no one wanted to return to the bad old days before.

Everyone knew that the fires of judgment had fallen on the wicked when the world stood locked in endless combat and only the righteous had been saved. Everyone knew that obedience was a small price to pay for safety and that asking questions would bring down swift punishment. Righteous punishment since challenging Hydra was to challenge peace itself and thus the average citizen learned to follow, to conform, and to obey.

However, despite the Red Skull’s power, his control was not as absolute as Hydra tried to make the world believe.

There were those who resisted indoctrination in every country, small pockets of opposition that could not be wiped out. Killing one rebel only made the rest fight harder, the ranks of the Resistance swelling after each atrocity. As long as Hydra ruled with tyranny then there would always be rebels to stand in opposition, people prepared to die in the service of their cause.

Even if the war could not be won in a single lifetime, even if Hydra’s armies slaughtered friends and families with waves of ice blue lightning, the Resistance would go on.

As long as one rebel still drew breath, Hydra would never rule unchallenged; the only choice was victory or absolute defeat. The Resistance was fighting for an ideal rather than land or life or body. It was fighting for a future in which innocents could not be slaughtered at the whims of Hydra's soldiers and its most effective members were based in Region 7 – what had been Grenoble, France.

These agents called themselves SHIELD to remind the world that they were meant to be protectors and in homage to the man who had been the first to die. For SHIELD's founders had fought against Hydra long before the Day of Fire – back when Hydra was just another division of the Nazi army – and the Howling Commandos had known that Red Skull was preparing to reshape history.

Arnim Zola told them exactly that after Captain America and Sergeant Barnes had fallen, unable to resist boasting about Hydra’s victory.

“Don’t bother to mourn your captain; you will join him soon enough,” the scientist had cackled before running into the next train car, the Commandos’ bullets harmlessly deflected as the door slammed shut behind him. “The Red Skull is going to slaughter you and all your allies, everyone who has ever dared to challenge Hydra will be burned to dust. He is completely mad, you see. Mad enough to change the world singlehandedly.”

Then Zola had separated his train car from the others, the Commandos unable to do anything but watch as their captain’s killer fled and this failure would haunt them until their dying days. For without the scientist, the Commandos had no proof of what was coming and even though Colonel Phillips had believed their warning, his superiors did not.

Indeed, SHIELD might never have existed if Howard Stark and Peggy Carter had not listened to their comrades when the Howling Commandos staggered back into the SSR’s base camp, grief in their eyes and a warning on their tongue.

But Stark and Carter did listen. They listened and they took action and so they survived when so many others fell.

By the time the globe began to go dark, Stark had already packed his lab for transport. He and Carter gathered every soldier who would listen and then they disappeared. For the SSR had no chance of defeating Hydra, not when Captain America had fallen and its leaders' heads were buried in the sand. They could only regroup and live to fight another day.

A coward's path, perhaps. But the Red Skull’s artillery turned the SSR's camp into a smoking crater only a few hours after Stark and Carter had deserted, Hydra’s tanks rolling over the few survivors without mercy and leaving behind nothing but the ashes of the dead. The Red Skull knew exactly who had destroyed so many of his bases and he was determined to turn Captain America’s allies into a forgotten memory.

In truth, he nearly succeeded. The SSR had all but disappeared when Hydra’s initial assault finally ended, the Day of Fire leaving the Red Skull’s enemies scattered and afraid. The surviving Allied and Axis forces found themselves under siege soon after, Hydra offering succor to defectors and slaughtering the rest.

The Red Skull claimed such deaths were necessary. He blamed his enemies for the destruction that his own bombs had created in order to justify the survivors’ subjugation, and most people found it easier to listen than to fight. Hydra’s weapons had only grown stronger since the Tesseract was first discovered and there were few things in the world that could block their fatal light.

One was lost in the Alps with Captain America while the rest were scattered across seven continents. These artifacts were the remnants of a long forgotten war, the detritus of a civilization in which few now believed, and their reappearance usually preceded a violent change in history. Without the Tesseract, the Red Skull would have been nothing but a madman – his grand schemes ultimately futile – and SHIELD could have gone toe to toe with Hydra on an even battlefield.

However, that future was not this one. In this life, SHIELD was forced to fight the Tesseract with nothing but human ingenuity and here Howard Stark quickly proved invaluable.

Some of the men had grumbled about him during that first long march, when the night sky had glowed with fire and the horizon burned. The soldiers didn't want to carry his inventions through the mud and muck and bombed out buildings when they could be carrying food instead and there might have been a mutiny if Hydra’s men had not attacked.

The survivors of the SSR had been traveling for days and they had begun to grow complacent, exhaustion and shock making them less cautious than they should have been. Indeed, the soldiers didn’t even notice Hydra’s patrol until they were surrounded, black-clad figures materializing from the shadows like demons in the night. They were outgunned, outnumbered, and ready to surrender, but Stark and Agent Carter would not accept defeat so easily.

She made a show of giving up, drawing the attention of Hydra’s solders while Howard reached into one of the crates that his companions had complained about so loudly, removing a dull metal sphere a little smaller than his fist. The scientist had invented something for this exact situation due to Captain America’s unfortunate habit of getting himself surrounded and as he threw the sphere into the air, he felt a stab of grief.

Steve and Bucky had been there when he first tested his invention – in fact, it had been the sergeant's bright idea – and Bucky had laughed until he'd cried at each failed prototype.

The two men had been Howard's friends as well as colleagues and their deaths had cut him deeper than he wanted to admit. Maybe that's why he had listened to the Commandos’ warning when everyone else did nothing; why he was determined to continue fighting against Hydra now that the other men were gone.

This version of his weapon worked much better than that first prototype, the sphere shooting out three waves of electricity in a neat radius. The shocks were strong enough to knock a man unconscious and while some of Hydra’s soldiers managed to dodge the first barrage, Carter and the Commandos took full advantage of the opening.

When Howard picked up the depleted sphere a minute later, all of Hydra's men had been defeated and were lying unconscious on the ground. Most of the SSR's soldiers wanted to kill their captives in retaliation, but Carter would not have it. Only her steadfast refusal stopped the clearing from becoming a bloody slaughterhouse. Instead, her men left Hydra’s soldiers in the forest, one last act of mercy before she learned that compassion had no place in this new world.

The group had several more close escapes as they traveled onward, once quiet towns now turned to anarchy. Panicked citizens convinced the world was ending were almost as dangerous as Hydra’s soldiers and the SSR’s survivors were met more often with suspicion than hospitality. Some left, some died, and some just disappeared. Thus, by the time Stark and Carter reached their destination, their allies numbered only twelve.

However, these men and women were twelve of the best and brightest, those who had seen Hydra’s villainy firsthand and knew better than to believe in the Red Skull’s promises. They stayed because they knew that the war was far from over, that the war would never be over as long as Hydra ruled, and they looked to Agent Carter for direction on how to win the coming fight.

In truth, Peggy was never entirely sure how or why she became the leader of their ragtag company. She certainly hadn’t intended to create a guerrilla army; she had just been trying to save as many people as she could.

But it was her contacts in the French Resistance that gave SHIELD its bolt-hole, an abandoned hydroelectric facility in Grenoble where Stark could tinker to his heart’s content. It was her vision that drove them forward and her truth that kept them honest. For Peggy did not try to sugarcoat the cost of fighting and she did not judge the people who could not stomach it.

However, the agent had no family or friends to protect now that London was a crater so who better to lead the war against Hydra’s tyranny? She had nothing left to lose that truly mattered and someone had to stand for justice after the world's governments collapsed.

Even the most detailed constitution hadn't accounted for the deaths of everyone in power and the news that trickled in from around the globe was worse than anyone had dreamed. The few rulers who had survived the Day of Fire were as panicked as their subjects and most attempts to control the chaos quickly devolved into brute force supremacy.

Only the Red Skull had the strength and numbers to enforce his will and so he did exactly that. His victory was not without its cost but the early resistance fighters were too scattered to be effective and Hydra's agent executed everyone they caught. The rebels who survived were the ones who learned to hide their anger, wearing a mask of obedience in public while planning vengeance privately.

They planned and they waited and they began to join together over time. They became the Resistance and while some groups worked within the new world order and some went underground, all of their leaders knew that wasting lives in reckless anger would gain them nothing in the end.

Fighting Hydra face to face was suicidal, no matter how tempting it might be. So while no one was willing to stand by and let innocents be slaughtered, even SHIELD had to work in secrecy.

The former Howling Commandos infiltrated Hydra bases, stealing information and freeing prisoners before disappearing in the night. Half of SHIELD’s new recruits came from these rescue missions, including the woman who would become Dugan’s wife.

Some agents acted as moles, volunteering to join Hydra and then feeding the Resistance information, while others took out convoys on the road. SHIELD had half a dozen missions running at any given moment and its leaders did their part. Indeed, Agent Carter proved to have a knack for assassinations. She killed a dozen of Hydra's greatest leaders before her face grew too recognizable and Stark’s inventions were the only thing that made this possible.

Without Howard Stark, SHIELD would have been much less successful, the scientist burning the midnight oil to keep his colleagues safe. He built weapons and communications, creating his own bullets and hand-soldering a hundred custom radios one by one. His work helped SHIELD become known for spiriting prisoners away just before their executions and sending messages that even Hydra could not trace.

The latter trick was more difficult once Hydra began to monitor all forms of communication, one wrong word bringing the death squads down. The Red Skull kept his conquered territories isolated in order to control them better and this separation was the first obstacle his enemies were forced overcome.

Which they did, using a combination of codes and tech and, on one memorable occasion, a flock of homing pigeons sent from the Americas. Because no matter how many hidden enclaves Hydra raided, no matter how many rebels were burned to ashes, the Resistance would not die.

However, as the fight dragged on and on, Peggy Carter came to realize that SHIELD’s efforts were little more than a holding action against an endless tide.

Two decades after the Day of Fire, Hydra was still unstoppable and no matter how many people the Resistance saved, there were always more to die. SHIELD was trying to staunch the bleeding of a thousand tiny cuts, taking out the Red Skull’s agents one by one when what it really needed to do was to burn his fortress down. If SHIELD and its allies were going to end this war before their children’s children were forced to join the struggle, their agents needed to attack outright instead of waiting for Hydra to make a grave mistake. But this was easier said than done and it was decades more before Carter’s plan was finalized.

\---

During this time, the members of the Resistance learned to be more vicious in their fighting methods and to squash any hint of mercy for their enemies. While Hydra contained a wide range of soldiers and only the most elite were true fanatics, the grunts were just as deadly with a weapon in their hands. Sometimes more dangerous when ambition drove them to new heights of cruelty.

The Red Skull had also placed a bounty on the heads of all Resistance members and while agents were barely worth the price of bullets, anyone who killed a leader would be an instant millionaire. Many bright young men and women tried to infiltrate resistance groups in order to collect these bounties and some relied on volume to make their fortune when other methods failed. The Mad Circus lost half its members to one particularly vicious traitor and after that news spread throughout the underground, paranoia became even more integral to the rebel way of life.

Such caution protected SHIELD and its allies whenever a mission ended badly, something that happened more often than they wanted to admit. This was the price of fighting and the fallen were mourned as heroes, their lives added to the ledger of blood and pain that Carter was determined to make the Red Skull eat one day.

Yet as bleak as the future often seemed, the lives of the Resistance consisted of more than strategy and skirmishing – there was also friendship, joy, and love. Morita was the first of the Howling Commandos to find romance; the tech fell head over heels for a pretty French girl who supplied his men with food sometimes. Love at first bite he called it, though it took six months of pleading before she agreed to be his wife.

This was cause for jubilation, the first in far too long, and soldiers knew how to party like their lives were on the line. That celebration lasted far into the evening and the newlyweds weren’t the only people who felt love in the air.

A wedding was hope for the future, hope that there could _be_ a future past this endless fighting, and it seemed that living under tyranny was an effective method for destroying prejudice. This was not true of everyone, but enough people had put aside their hatred for Jim Morita to marry a white woman with only the smallest bit of drunken grumbling. Enough that no one threatened Gabriel Jones when he began courting an Italian even though this relationship would have been grounds for lynching in the town where he was from.

Agent Carter had made it known that SHIELD would not allow discrimination within its ranks, the organization accepting anyone who wished to fight the Red Skull, and in return her people offered their unyielding loyalty.

How could they not when the Red Skull had continued his former master’s Holocaust under a different name? Hydra’s scientists always needed more warm bodies for their experiments and everyone knew that only Aryans were really human anyway. Queers, blacks, women, Jews, Muslims – to be different was to be targeted since the Red Skull didn’t care what people had to offer if they didn’t match his ideas of what humanity should be.

Those who were allowed to live were treated as second-class citizens and Peggy gathered many of them to her banner through the years. One of her best sources of information was as queer as queer could be; her finest sniper was a Muslim, and the Howling Commandos had been the backbone of SHIELD right from the start.

After all, Peggy had spent years overcoming her gender in the eyes of her commanders; she was hardly going to put her agents through that same bullshit now. So she didn’t. She judged her agents based on their skills alone and anyone who tried to do otherwise was quickly set to rights.

No one messed with Peggy Carter, not arrogant American soldiers, not Hydra generals, and certainly not bigots. Even the most arrogant loudmouth could only hang his head in shame after she was done with him. Sometimes she would use herself as an example, sometimes Jones or Morita, and sometimes she would talk about Captain America instead. Steve was a hero to SHIELD’s agents; he had given his life in the fight to destroy Hydra, and if a scrawny kid from Brooklyn could become the Red Skull’s nemesis, then SHIELD should turn no willing heart away.

Every time Peggy told that story, she had to take a moment. She still missed Steve even now and she couldn’t help feeling that things would have been different if he and the sergeant had survived.

However, memories couldn’t sustain her heart forever and Peggy gradually found herself turning to Howard Stark when her mood grew dim. The man was as irrepressible as ever despite the sharp change in his fortunes and he always helped her see the brighter side of life. Howard could find humor in the worst situations and his dark wit kept her from losing hope as the war dragged on.

Peggy might have been the anchor of their operation, but Howard was the idea man. He turned captured Hydra weapons into power sources for SHIELD's hideouts, built defenses that could block even the Tesseract’s fell magic, and still found the time to run a distillery on the side.

It was over one of Howard’s better efforts that Peggy finally kissed him, leaning forward to lick a drop of alcohol from the corner of his mouth. She was never sure why that night was different from the ones that came before it, but suddenly it seemed silly to keep on waiting for some perfect romance when she liked Stark just fine.

Sure they didn’t have the kind of love that poets spoke of, but it was sweet and comfortable and neither of them needed more than that. Howard and Peggy fell into bed together without regret or awkwardness, their pillow talk consisting of battle strategy as much as lovers’ promises.

Weird as it seemed to the people on the outside, their relationship made them happy and happiness was something to be treasured in those times. Even when it was unexpected, inconvenient and ruined all their plans.

Although Peggy had wanted children when she was younger, she had never expected to have them after the Day of Fire; she was much too busy fighting Hydra to take the time for that and this was not the sort of world she wanted to bring a kid into. Besides, the agent was getting old – truthfully she was middle-aged already – and everyone knew that child-rearing was a young woman’s game.

But once she and Howard realized that they had created a spark of life between them, Peggy could not imagine giving the child up. After all, she was already retired from most active missions and just this once, she wanted to do something for herself.

So Agent Carter disappeared for several months and on May 29th 1967, Anthony Edward Stark was born. Not into wealth as he might have been given Howard’s background, but into a family that loved him nonetheless. The boy grew up underfoot, tools and tech his toys as he say at his father's knee and trailed his mother through the halls of SHIELD's main bunker. Peggy gave Tony his first gun and taught him how to use it while his uncles taught him bombs and codes and other things.

By the time he reached his eighteenth birthday, Tony was one of SHIELD's most effective agents. However, inventing would always be his first love and he spent hours tinkering in his father's lab. It was there he made the breakthrough that Howard had been searching for for decades and allowed SHIELD’s final strike on the Red Skull to go forth.

Tony was twenty-one then, too afire with the joy of knowledge and discovery to realize what his work would mean. The Starks' device would allow an agent to pass through Hydra's security in order to reduce the Red Skull to dust and atoms, but no amount of science would bring that person back.

It was a suicide strike, plain and simple, and Peggy wouldn't ask anyone else to pay that price even though half her agents volunteered. They might be willing but for Peggy this was _personal_ and no amount of pleading changed her mind.

So she suited up one last time, tying back snow-white hair before gathering her weapons and saying farewell to the family she had made. Howard hugged Peggy tightly, the fierceness of his embrace belying the forced lightness of his smile, while Tony went over his mother's equipment one more time. He kept up a running patter as he always did when he was nervous, trying to drown his worry in a web of words and rambling. Peggy just listened even though she didn't need the explanation, waiting until her son trailed off into silence and then kissing his forehead like she had done when he was small.

Perhaps she should have whispered false promises or reminded Tony that she loved him, but that was not her way. Her son was strong and brilliant and while she knew that he would grieve for her, he would not allow her death to keep him from the fight. Although, in truth, Peggy hoped her sacrifice would finally end the battle and set her child free to live the life that he deserved.

The agent had no regrets when she left SHIELD's bunker and traveled to the Red Skull’s fortress, her contracts within those walls sneaking her inside. These double agents could only get her through the first level of security so the rest of Peggy’s mission relied on her skill and the device her boys had made.

While true invisibility was still impossible, Howard's tech would keep her from being noticed as long as she was cautious and no one paid much attention to old women anyway. To be honest, Peggy didn't entirely understand the science of it – something to do with energy fields and chameleons – but a Stark invention had never let her down.

Indeed, the eyes of Hydra's soldiers slid right past the agent as she crept through the citadel's barren halls. Although they couldn't see her, Hydra’s guards could still hear her footsteps and so it took Peggy several hours to make her way to the Red Skull's inner sanctum, each locked door a challenge to be overcome with skill or trickery. But Peggy Carter had earned her reputation and she could be patient for this prize.

She slipped through the final door behind one of the Red Skull's lieutenants, finally coming face to face with the man who had destroyed her world with the press of a button and a laugh. She had never seen him in the flesh before this moment and the pictures did not do justice to the true horror of his face.

He was more demon than man beneath that gleaming scarlet, a cruel sneer twisting his features as he tore into his lieutenant viciously. The Red Skull should be nearly ninety by now, but he did not look it. Instead his movements spoke of strength and coiled power, like a viper preparing to strike his enemies. Perhaps the serum had preserved him or perhaps Hydra's scientists had conquered death as well as life in the years since he had changed.

Truthfully, Peggy did not care as long as her bullets could still kill him and when the Red Skull was alone again, she stepped forward to do exactly that.

A better hero would have offered her enemy the chance to make peace with his sins, but Peggy was long past mercy for this monster who had once been a man. So she snuck up behind the Red Skull, pressing her pistol to his head moments before her cloaking device finally fizzled out. Howard had warned her that the power source would not last forever but it had gotten her far enough and she would not falter now.

“For Steve,” Peggy whispered as she pulled the trigger. Her bullet tore through the Red Skull in a spray of blood and bone that left him crumpled on the ground.

The agent waited until she was certain he was dead and then stepped over his corpse without a second glance. No matter how much she hated him, the Red Skull had never been worth dying for – not when he had a score of generals desperate for the chance to take his place.

But the Tesseract, that was worth everything. It was the foundation of Hydra's power and the Red Skull had never allowed it to leave his side for all the decades he had ruled.

Even now the cube stood near the window, glowing from within with an otherworldly light. Peggy couldn’t deny that it was beautiful, though she knew better than to touch it with bare hands. Touching the Tesseract would kill her in an instant and she couldn’t destroy the cube with any weapon SHIELD had built.

She couldn’t destroy it or steal it but Howard believed that she might be able to send it home instead. His research had shown that the cube was less a weapon than a portal and she just needed to discover how to knock.

This was something no one could tell her; something no one else had figured out over the past four decades, but Peggy had never been one to back down just because a task was hard. While the agent was no scientist to crack the cube's fell secrets, if science were the answer then Hydra would have solved this puzzle years ago.

As it was, Peggy was going to rely on something far more dangerous; she was going to rely on faith instead. So she pulled on her gloves and removed the Tesseract from its pedestal, setting the cube down carefully on the Red Skull's chest. It began to burn through his flesh almost immediately, his corpse made a sacrifice to the old gods of the Vikings and ancient history.

The agent had always been more concerned with practical matters than the spiritual, but Howard believed that death could be the answer; death and sacrifice opened doors that would not budge otherwise. So for the first time in her life, Peggy Carter fell to her knees and prayed.

“If you can hear me, take it back. Take back your cursed treasure and leave our world in peace,” she pleaded, staring into the blinding glow of the Tesseract as a beam of light shot toward the sky. “We don't want it and we don't need it, so take the damn thing back!”

The Red Skull's corpse was nearly gone now, flesh and bone transmuted into ashes, and Peggy could almost see something – someone – at the far end of the beam. But the Tesseract wasn’t moving; it remained a fixed point amidst the chaos even as everything around it was sucked into the sky. She was about to die for nothing and that was unacceptable.

So Peggy reached into the light, her skin burning as though a thousand knives had sliced into her hand. It was everything she could do to keep from screaming as her fingers closed around the Tesseract and yet this fiery agony meant nothing compared to the peace within her soul.

“Freely given,” she whispered and the cube sang in answer to her sacrifice. As Hydra's soldiers finally burst into the room, Peggy Carter smiled and the Tesseract dissolved into white light.

\---

With the death of Agent Carter, her son took up the fight in earnest, slowly gathering the best and brightest rebels to his side. There was Dr. Banner, a renowned scientist who had been forced to research supersoldiers until his experiments went wrong, and Natasha Romanoff, who had been raised in one of Hydra’s facilities before she strode out bathed in blood.

Tony also expanded SHIELD's dealings with other Resistance groups, building alliances with those who respected Peggy Carter's legacy. While some rebels doubted that he could fill his mother's shoes at first, the Mad Circus and the War Machine were willing to take the risk and the work they did together soon brought the rest on board. Because the younger Stark combined the best of his father’s genius with his mother’s determination and someday he was going to topple Hydra from its throne.


	2. Ice

“This is a terrible idea. You know that, right?” Natasha asked, though she still walked over to help Tony when he started laying out his gear. The pair had been sneaking through the countryside for two days and the worst part of their journey still lay ahead, snow-covered mountains that loomed before them now.

“It may be terrible, but it’s the only chance we have. My mother cut off one of Hydra's heads when she destroyed the Tesseract, but there's still a horde of lesser evils with bullets in their guns and they’ve had decades to fortify their power base,” Tony said, buckling the straps of his pack across his chest as Natasha shrugged into her own. “However, if my uncles' stories are half as true as my father always claimed, Captain America's serum could turn this war around. Even if Banner can’t recreate the serum, we’ll have kept a major weapon out of Hydra’s hands and you know that's worth the risk.”

“Fair enough,” Natasha conceded, never one to continue arguing when the other side was right. “But Hydra’s men have spent years searching these mountains for his corpse; how do you expect to find the captain when they’ve failed?”

“Oh ye of little faith. Haven't you learned to trust in me by now?” Tony asked the redhead with a crooked smirk. “I’m not looking for Captain America; I’m looking for his shield and no one knows Vibranium like my father did. Finding Captain America was his singular obsession so I'd wager that I’m still one step ahead of Hydra's boys.”

“Well, you’re wagering our lives, so I really hope you’re right,” Natasha answered, politely ignoring the way Tony faltered when he spoke about his dad. 

Howard Stark had passed away two months before at the ripe old age of ninety-five and while his death had been peaceful, his son still missed him every day. However, Tony was a Stark and Starks never dwelled on their emotions when they could work instead.

“Of course I’m right,” the man pronounced, using boldness to shake off his sober mood. Then he pulled out his scanner, calibrating the machine according to his father’s calculations before telling Natasha to head out. The other agent was a better climber so she took point while Tony followed in her footsteps through the snow.

The conversation ended then since both agents needed all of their breath for the mountain. But Tony found that the silence didn’t make his mind any quieter; it just made his troubled thoughts seem louder as they bounced around his head. Although he had not lied to Natasha, strategy was not the only thing that drove him on this mission and even if Captain America had been a normal man, the scientist would be here anyway.

Tony needed to find the captain's body because his parents had loved Steve Rogers more than anything and he didn’t think they would rest easy as long as the other man was lost. Howard Stark had said as much before he died; spoke of his admiration and the captain’s endless spirit and how it sometimes felt like Steve had been a ghost in Peggy’s bed.

That still seemed a little weird but his father had spoken of the memory with fondness rather than jealousy and Tony could only feel the same. His parents’ love for Steve Rogers was part of what made them his parents, part of what had driven them to fight when so many others fell, and he wouldn't judge what made them happy in such a fucked up world as this. So the scientist was going to honor his father's last request; he was going to bring Captain America home to SHIELD where he belonged.

The pair climbed for what seemed like hours before the scanner finally pinged, sensing a faint trace of Vibranium at the far edge of its range. The signal was strange, sharper and far more west than Tony had expected, but he had faith in his father's work so he followed where it led. 

Now the man took point, his scanner leading them over the next rise and down into a steep crevasse that meandered through the stone. It had probably been a river once but the water was long gone now and had left only this icy road behind. 

The agents' path was littered with jagged stones and icicles as they continued westward and without Natasha’s skill, Tony would have never made it to his goal alive. He was too busy watching his scanner to watch where his feet were going and his companion saved him from bashing his skull on the rock half a dozen times. Honestly, he was cold and tired and far too old for this and as soon as their search was over, the scientist was going to stay in his nice warm lab from now on. 

However, Tony forgot about the ache in his lungs and the fact that he was probably getting frostbite when he rounded one last bend and saw a flash of red and blue in the corner of his eye. It was just a glint of color in the wall of ice beside him, but even if his scanner hadn’t been going haywire, he would have known that they'd arrived. Because his father had given him a toy shield when he was seven and the real thing looked exactly as he'd always thought it would. 

So Tony turned off his scanner and walked forward until his nose was almost touching the ice, his breath catching at the sight which met his eyes. When the scientist squinted, he could see the outline of a body, limbs curled in and braced for impact with the ground.

“You do have a plan to get him out of there, right? Because I’m not carrying a frozen corpse all the way back down this mountain,” Natasha cut in, the other agent puncturing his awestruck moment with her practicality.

In lieu of answering, Tony tapped the communicator in his ear, punching in Banner's code and starting to talk as soon as the other man picked up. “All right, Big Guy. Time for the distraction we discussed. Just remember, I need them too busy to notice that I’m carving half this mountain out with plasma cutters so you better make it big. Once you have Hydra's outpost emptied, Ghost will drop in to steal our ride.”

“Not a problem, boss,” Banner replied, his voice crackling over the radio. “The Other Guy hates Hydra and he's been itching for a fight. Just make sure you find me once I come out of it.”

“Don’t worry. Ghost will pick you up on his way to wreck the bird. You can help him scrub it clean before you disappear.” 

“Works for me. Give me five and then start cutting; I guarantee they’ll be too busy to wonder what you're doing over there,” Banner said before cutting the transmission.

Once the line was clear, Tony sent out one more message, letting Ghost know that he should be standing by.

“You’re setting the Hulk on Hydra’s outpost? That’s almost cruel,” Natasha remarked, though the curve of her smile said that she approved. 

Most of the weight they'd carried had been the plasma cutter and the redhead helped Tony unpack before moving off to a safe distance. She settled down to wait while the scientist mapped out his angles; he didn't want to slice Captain America in half by accident.

Tony aimed wide when he finally powered up the cutter, carving out a massive block of ice from the frozen mountainside. The machine was starting to smoke by the time he finished and he switched it off quickly before something could explode. 

But the device had done its job and Tony jumped back as the sheer weight of ice split the captain's prison from the side of the crevasse. It slid forward with a deafening crash that echoed out like thunder, and the noise alone would have brought Hydra down on his head in minutes if the Hulk hadn't been keeping the outpost occupied

As it was, the scientist just asked Natasha to throw him his bags, pulling out the rope and ice hooks that he'd lugged up the mountainside. With the redhead's help, Tony soon had Captain America trussed and tied for transport and the pair settled down to wait for their ride out.

Thankfully, it wasn't too long before the scientist received a transmission from Ghost saying that the infiltrator was on his way to pick them up. François Morita – codename Ghost – was the grandson of the Howling Commando and he had been one of Tony's most valuable assets ever since he'd joined the fight. The man was seriously a ninja, able to slip in and out of fortified bases without raising the alarms while his partner had a scary knack for camouflage.

Frederick was back with the truck since no one else was as good at hiding in plain sight and Tony hadn't wanted to risk his life without good cause. Sure this mission might change the war but it was also personal and he hated seeing people die for the choices that he made. Hell, Tony would have left all of his agents behind if it had been possible.

But he needed someone who could fly a helicopter in these conditions and François was the best pilot SHIELD had ever had. Tony didn't trust anyone else to land a chopper here without exploding and he still wasn't sure how the other man would manage it.

The scientist had to close his eyes as the helicopter's blades nearly hit the walls of ice and rock around them, but François was every bit as talented as his legend claimed. Once the bird had landed, the three of them leaped into action, attaching the net of ropes and chains to the helicopter as tightly as they could. If the block of ice were any heavier, this plan would never work, but Tony had done the calculations while they waited and with one of Hydra's choppers, they should just manage it. 

So he buckled himself next to François in the copilot's seat while Natasha jumped in back to watch their cargo and Tony held on tightly when the chopper's rotors began to spin. It was a bit of a struggle to get off the ground, the helicopter lurching dangerously as the ropes pulled taut. But François managed to steady it before they crashed into the mountain, his expression hardly changing even as Tony fought the urge to scream.

“Remind me to give you a raise,” he muttered when the rotors missed the wall by a hair's breadth, his knuckles white around the edges of his seat.

“You don't pay me, boss. Remember?” François replied with a laugh, swinging the helicopter around to the northeast. The trek that had taken Tony and Natasha hours flew by in twenty minutes and he would have much preferred to conduct his search like this. But SHIELD didn't have helicopters of its own – they were too big to hide and too hard to fuel – and the Hulk could only keep Hydra distracted for so long.

Even now they were running under the wire to escape before their enemy realized what had happened and, more importantly, before Hydra realized the treasure SHIELD had found. If Commander Pierce learned that Captain America's body had been discovered, he would burn Europe to the ground in order to reclaim it and then they'd all be fucked.

The Resistance had only survived this long because the Red Skull hadn't wanted to destroy the world, he'd wanted to command it and that had protected SHIELD where mercy failed. But Alexander Pierce had shown himself to be a new breed of despot, one willing to cut off his left hand in order to spite the other, and they couldn’t afford to draw his gaze just yet. 

So Tony didn't relax until they reached their destination and even then he kept one eye on the horizon as Frederick guided the chopper down. Ghost needed his assistance because the Chameleon had lived up to his name and their truck was completely invisible from above. Even when the agent opened up the back in order to load Captain America for transport, Tony had trouble seeing the vehicle underneath his painted canvas and Frederick would have been one hell of an artist in another life.

As it was, the man just blew a kiss to his partner as François flew off to pick up Banner and then helped Natasha make sure that their cargo was secure. They had a long drive back to SHIELD's main base in Grenoble, one made all the longer for the checkpoints they'd be dodging, and the sooner they got back, the sooner Tony could see the captain buried properly.

So he ushered his agents into the cab of the truck and started driving, doing his best to ignore the various means that his passengers used to keep themselves entertained. Natasha and Frederick got on like a house on fire and Tony had no idea where an ex-Hydra assassin had learned so many stupid games. Seriously, her glee at winning License Plate Bingo was almost disturbing and he was relieved when passing convoys made her duck below the dash.

However, years of practice helped Tony keep his irritation in check and some nine hours later, the trio finally neared their goal. By this point Frederick was dozing off against the window, the agent having lost his battle with exhaustion once he knew his partner was all right. 

François had called a few hours earlier to say that he'd picked up Banner and dumped the chopper in the Western Alps, the two men making their own way back home in case the truck got caught. Tony wouldn't be surprised if they actually beat him to Grenoble since François had sticky fingers and a thing for racy sports cars that belonged to Hydra officers. The agent wasn't stupid enough to drive a stolen vehicle into the city, but he'd definitely be traveling faster than this hunk of junk. 

Indeed, François was there to greet Tony's group when they finally arrived, waiting with the undercover agent who would let their truck into Grenoble. SHIELD had dozens of these agents scattered across Europe, people who obeyed the law in order to help the Resistance avoid its enemies. 

Agent Carter had believed that the best person to fight Hydra was someone who knew its inner workings and Tony had continued cultivating such sleepers after his mother died, several of SHIELD's agents almost to Pierce's inner circle now. He intended to enhance those agents with Erskine's serum if Banner could replicate it since his mother's death had proven that killing Hydra's ruler would never be enough. 

The Resistance needed to move as one, rebels smuggled into key positions so that they could strike down all of Hydra's leaders simultaneously. Only then could SHIELD be certain their enemy was conquered; only then would they be free.

But first Tony had to get Captain America back to base since all of SHIELD's plans would be ruined if he got captured now. So even though his team had dodged hundreds of patrols just like this in the past – Ghost and the Chameleon out on point while the Black Widow watched their rear – Tony didn't relax until the walls of SHIELD's bunker were surrounding him again.

From there the day disappeared in a flurry of delegation, a fresh team moving Captain America to the secondary lab for thawing while Tony caught up on some much-needed sleep. When he woke up a few hours later, he went straight to the laboratory, only stopping to eat because Natasha shoved food into his hands.

Banner was already there, looking only slightly worse for wear after his run-in with Hydra's soldiers, and he quickly caught Tony up on the preparations he had missed. Truthfully, there wasn't much to tell. The doctor had set up heaters and fans to help the ice melt faster, scanners ready to analyze the captain's body as soon as it thawed out. He'd even set up a video recorder and when Tony asked who would really want to watch _this_ , Banner just shrugged and said it was for posterity.

 _Because melting ice is so historical,_ the man snarked to himself, quickly losing patience. As excited as he had been to find Captain America, this was just plain boring and if Tony stayed in this lab much longer, things were going to explode. 

So the scientist left Banner to his vigil and went back to his office to do some paperwork. There were supplies to obtain, intelligence reports to read, and all sorts of other tiny details to take care of so that SHIELD kept going strong. Honestly, Tony hated these minutiae, which is why he'd created a robotic assistant in his thirties to handle most of it. But the scientist still had to sign off on all major decisions and he had a knack for planning missions that no one else could match.

Maybe it was just that no one else was crazy enough to attempt the kind of schemes that made Tony famous amongst the Underground. Even his decision to find Captain America had garnered weird looks from his lieutenants and Natasha was hardly the first to speak her doubts.

However, like most of his craziest ideas, this one had born fruit and Tony had trouble keeping his thoughts focused on his work. His mind kept drifting back to the lab where a ghost was slowly thawing and the fifth time he found himself doodling Captain America's shield in the margins, he put his paperwork aside. There was no point in reading about supplies and requisitions if he wasn't going to remember the information and he was too distracted for his usual recall to kick in.

So Tony left the papers on his desk for Jarvis to scan and grabbed a pencil, sketching out ideas for SHIELD's new supermen. If this worked out the way he hoped, the Resistance might finally have the edge on Hydra, but even superheroes would need weapons for the fight.

Actual weapons since there was only one shield to go around and Tony didn't have a stockpile of Vibranium sitting on a shelf. His agents would have to make do with more normal materials when they began their final Blitzkrieg and either won or lost for good. The scientist was almost afraid to think about the future for fear of jinxing SHIELD's last mission and yet, he also wasn't sure how he would handle peace.

This was the only life he'd ever known; he'd been born into the war and for years he'd believed that he would die in it as well. So it was slightly terrifying to think of a world where SHIELD no longer needed him and he could walk the streets openly without worrying about a bullet in the back. 

Of course, Tony would probably have work to do for decades even if Hydra was obliterated since it would take time to restore what had been lost. It would take time for people to remember how to make their own choices and rebuild the governments that had fallen beneath the Red Skull's hands.

Honestly, the scientist didn't need to worry about being useless for a long, long time and he tried to tell himself that being a civilian would be a good thing in the end. The scientist would finally be free to do anything he wanted, free to put aside the weapons and create something beautiful instead. He could finally build the future his father had always dreamed of, one where technology made people's lives easier instead of shorter; he could finally meet the leaders of the War Machine in person and beg Pepper Potts to date him like he'd wanted to for years. Tony had always had a thing for redheads with some fire in their veins.

Thoughts of Pepper proved to be an effective distraction from the thawing corpse one floor below him, his doodles taking a far more lascivious turn. There was just something about the woman that Tony couldn't seem to forget, brilliance and competence wrapped up in one gorgeous package – gorgeous even through the crackling static of his video uplink.

Of course, she hadn't seemed particularly impressed by his attempts to get her attention in the past, though the scientist was pretty sure he'd caught her partner Rhodes grinning in amusement once or twice. However, Pepper's resistance only made her a more attractive challenge and he was busy preparing another clever pick-up line when his comm finally buzzed. 

Banner was calling from the second laboratory. His voice was shaking with surprise and excitement and when Tony heard the doctor's words, he forgot about his romance plans.

“Boss. You need to get down here ASAP. There were two of them, not just the captain, and they're both still alive.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As this fic is turning out rather longer than planned, I think there will actually be 6 chapters overall instead of 5. And yes, for those who asked, I did make Tony 3 years older than canon on purpose. I have my reasons.


	3. Stone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which I finally earn my pairing tag.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My usual beta has disappeared again, but she did manage to edit this first so you won't have to deal with my erratic use of commas until the next chapter comes around.

Bucky was warm. He hadn't expected death to be so warm and yet there was no way that he'd survived. Because the last thing he remembered was falling from Zola's train as Steve tried to reach him, the sight of his best friend's horrified face burned into his brain. Sure he didn't actually remember the impact, but that was probably a blessing, and even Steve couldn't have defeated gravity.

So he was dead and he was warm, which meant that his father had been right about everything. His old man had always said that queers didn't go to Heaven and even if Bucky had never acted on his feelings, he hadn't tried to fight them very hard. Or maybe it was the blood on his hands that damned him since the sniper had always known that orders didn't make the killing right. He had done it for himself, for his fellow soldiers and for Steve, but his father's God didn't listen to excuses from the likes of him.

Besides, the fact that he regretted nothing made asking for forgiveness rather pointless and he would be happy to burn forever if it meant that Steve survived. He just hoped that the other man hadn't done anything stupid once he'd fallen; Steve was supposed to marry that Carter gal and have lots of gorgeous children, not get killed for Bucky's sake.

However, as the sergeant's memories came back to him, he realized that Steve had done exactly that.

“That fucking idiot,” he burst out and it was only when he tumbled off the bed that he realized he had moved. Because he remembered the blond falling after him, his handholds giving way as he'd lunged for Bucky, and the other man had done his best to protect him from the impact with the ground. Steve had died for him, which meant that the stupid punk should be around here somewhere, and when the sniper found him, he was going to kick the damn fool's ass.

“Easy, soldier. You're safe here but you need to relax.”

Bucky started at the words. The sergeant had been too out of it to realize that another man was standing in the corner and he started to wonder if this was really Hell when he looked around the room.

While most of the equipment was unfamiliar, the soldier knew a hospital when he saw one just as he knew the ache of healing injuries. So Bucky staggered to his feet, his body feeling strangely off balance as he pushed himself upright and asked the only question that really mattered now.

“Where's Steve? Is he all right?”

“Steve? Oh, you mean Captain America. He's fine, I promise. You're both fine. Or at least, you will be with some rest,” the doctor told him, holding up his hands in reassurance. The man was making little motions like he wanted Bucky to lie down, but at least he was smart enough to keep his hands to himself. If he hadn't, the sniper probably would have put him through the wall because he had never liked people touching him unexpectedly and he had only gotten twitchier after Zola tortured him. 

So Bucky was going to stay on his feet until he was convinced that this doctor was actually an ally and his paranoid streak kept pointing out every detail that didn’t seem to fit. However, even if they had been captured by the enemy, Steve was still the sergeant’s first priority and he forced himself to listen when the doctor spoke again.

“Your captain is recovering in another room and I’m sure he’ll come see you as soon as he can walk. You were both pretty beat up when we found you, but you just got out of surgery so would you _please_ lie down before the painkillers wear off. I'm sorry I couldn't save your arm, but to be honest, we weren't actually expecting either of you to be alive.”

“My arm?” Bucky muttered in confusion, following the doctor's gaze down to his left. Then he jerked sideways, nearly falling over as he slammed back into the bed. His left arm was missing, the whole limb gone just below the shoulder and the soldier nearly started hyperventilating at the sight.

How was he supposed to watch Steve's back if he couldn't even hold a rifle steady? How were they supposed to destroy Hydra now? The fight had been far from over when they fell and Bucky rather doubted that someone else had finished it. Which meant that Captain America would still be needed and the sniper had to help him; he _had_ to help because the idea of being useless was worse than anything. 

But Bucky shoved that feeling down where he kept everything else that he didn't want to think about, down with his memories of Zola and the hot curl of jealousy when Peggy made Steve laugh. 

The soldier would freak out later once he was sure that his best friend was actually okay and no one else was watching. He couldn't let the higher-ups discover just how broken he was underneath his cocky smile, not when that was sure to get him discharged immediately.

So Bucky held it together by sheer force of will, straightening up to his full height and glaring at the doctor until he dropped his eyes. 

“Take me to Steve,” he demanded, thankful that his voice didn’t waver on the words. If the sniper had learned anything about army doctors since being drafted, it was that they really only cared whether or not a man could fight. You could be completely cock-eyed and ready to snap at the first crack of thunder, but if you could still pull a trigger then the docs would sign your paperwork.

However, this guy just kept waffling on about Bucky’s recovery and the soldier’s paranoia was getting harder to ignore. Because if the doctor was really on his side, then why the _hell_ wasn't he letting Bucky see Steve like he had asked? 

No, this man was hiding something, something important, and the sergeant was starting to lose control of his more violent impulses. But just as he was preparing to do something drastic, another man burst into the room, his entrance slamming the door back against the wall. 

The sharp crack of sound sent Bucky scrambling for cover, grabbing a syringe from the tray of medical equipment by the bed along the way. It wasn't the best weapon but the other men didn't seem like fighters and it made him feel better to have something sharp in hand. However, when his heart finally stopped pounding long enough for him to look at the new arrival closely, fighting was suddenly the last thing on Bucky’s mind.

“Howard?!” he exclaimed in shock, though even as he said it, the sergeant knew it wasn't true. While the resemblance was uncanny, Howard Stark had been several decades younger and the inventor had never spoken with such a strong French accent. 

“You're awake. That's fantastic. I'm sorry about the doctor here; he's not really comfortable with soldiers and your situation is rather unique, isn't it? But I promise we're not actually the enemy or whatever else you're thinking in that crazy head of yours. In fact, I'll take you to Steve right now if you're up for walking and if not, I'm sure we've got a wheelchair somewhere in this place. Heck, I can build you one if need be, wouldn't take more than a few minutes with the stuff I have on hand. Oh, and to answer your question, Howard was my father and we have a lot to talk about.”

“I... what?” the soldier muttered, this torrent of words too much for his shell-shocked mind to process rapidly. But Bucky was pretty sure this man had just claimed that Howard Stark was his father and that was definitely impossible.

So he growled when the stranger tried to take his syringe away, the other man backing off quickly after the sniper bared his teeth.

“All right, you can keep your sharp pointy object if it means that much to you,” Howard's double said, raising his hands in surrender before saying something to the doctor that made him leave the room.

Bucky relaxed a bit now that he only had one person to keep track of, watching the man out of the corner of his eye in case he tried something else. But the guy seemed content to stay on his own side of the room, though he kept opening his mouth like he was going to say something before shutting it again.

This somewhat awkward silence gave Bucky plenty of time to stare and it really was sort of freaky how similar this guy and Howard looked. They weren’t identical twins but there was definitely a resemblance and if it hadn’t been so crazy, the soldier might have believed the father thing. 

However, just when his curiosity was starting to get the better of his suspicion, the door opened again and a gorgeous redhead pushed a wheelchair into the room. She really was a knockout and just because Bucky was stupidly in love with Steve didn’t mean that he couldn’t appreciate the view. Although, when the woman turned to look at him, he had to reconsider his admiration because there was a distinct feeling of threat in those pretty eyes.

To be honest, it was a little disturbing since he’d never seen a dame look so murderous before and if these people actually were the enemy, Bucky would obviously have to plan his escape very carefully. Particularly since he could barely stand without swaying and while the soldier tried to hide his weakness, he was grateful when the redhead motioned for him to sit down. 

Bucky still kept a tight grip on his weapon as Howard’s double came up behind him, trying not to flinch at the sensation of someone standing at his back. But the man just grabbed his chair and pushed it forward, the sniper gritting his teeth when the movement jostled the raw stump of his arm. This was only one of the wounds announcing its presence now that the drugs were wearing off, but Bucky wasn't going to ask for painkillers until he'd seen Steve with his own eyes. So he shoved the pain to the back of his mind, forcing himself to focus on his surroundings as the other man wheeled him from the room.

“Your name is James Buchanan Barnes, isn't it?” Howard's double asked as gleaming medical equipment gave way to rough concrete walls. “Best friend of one Steve Rogers, better known as Captain America? My name is Anthony Edward Stark and this is SHIELD's Grenoble Headquarters.” 

Bucky could almost hear the capitals in the man's voice and although his surroundings didn't look particularly impressive, the army could be running low on funds by now. Hell, the Howling Commandos had been lucky to get bullets for a few of their later missions even with Howard's money backing them and this thought brought him right back around to his strange guide again.

“Anthony Stark... And you're Howard's son...? You do know that's impossible?” Bucky asked skeptically, looking back over his shoulder at the other man. However, even though his expression was definitely a little shifty, Bucky had always been good at sensing liars and this guy seemed sincere.

“Well, everyone calls me Tony, but yes, that's one of the things we need to talk about. However, I think I'd better wait until you see Steve to have that conversation because what I have to tell you is going to be a shock. Although, truthfully, I was pretty shocked myself when we found you in those mountains; I was only expecting Captain America and just his corpse at that. However, once we saw your dog tags everything made sense. The surviving Howling Commandos always said that both of you had fallen but no one ever put two and two together before now.”

“The others, they're alive?” Bucky asked, temporarily distracted from whatever secrets this Tony was trying to talk around.

Though maybe he could guess at one of them when the answer to his question was an uncomfortable shrug and quickly averted eyes. His friends were dead; they must all be dead to cause that kind of guilty silence and Bucky wasn't sure that he wanted to know what had happened anymore.

“Not exactly,” Tony finally muttered when the silence dragged too long. “Even though they didn't die the way you're probably thinking. It's complicated; hell, this whole thing is insane and I wouldn't be surprised if you assume I'm crazy once I finally explain. But first, as promised, here's an old friend who's been waiting to see you.”

The man stopped in front of a door and pushed it open with a flourish, revealing a room almost identical to the one where Bucky had woken up. But what made sniper push himself out of his chair and stagger forward was the sight of Steve.

“Bucky, you’re awake!” his captain exclaimed, holding out a hand to catch the other man as he all but fell against the bed. To be honest, Steve looked awful: fading bruises across his chest and his leg up in a sling, but his smile was still the best thing that Bucky had ever seen. A smile that dropped off his face as soon as he finally got a good look at his friend.

“Christ, pal. You look like you’ve been through the ringer,” Steve murmured, catching Bucky’s face between his hands, and the blond’s concern threatened to break the soldier’s composure where pain and shock had failed.

So he pushed himself upright with a little shake of his head, mouthing “Later” at the question in Steve’s eyes. Then Bucky turned back to Tony, leaning against his friend’s shoulder for support as he settled on the bed.

“All right, then. We’re both here so why don’t you explain what the hell is going on?” the soldier demanded, Steve nodding in agreement at his side.

“Right, I let you put me off while we were waiting for Bucky to wake up, but if you want our cooperation, you had best spit out those secrets that you’ve been chewing on. Beginning with how Stark has a son that’s twice his age.”

Faced with this united front, Tony just sighed and grabbed a chair from the corner, dragging it over to the foot of the bed before sitting down. “I suppose that’s as good place to start as any. I was born in 1967 to Howard Stark and Peggy Carter and I just turned 45 this spring. The two of you have been asleep, preserved in ice for almost seventy years.”

The man had been right, it sounded crazy, but Bucky still couldn’t see any sign of falsehood on his face. And this story would explain Tony’s resemblance to both Stark and Carter, though the sniper had trouble believing that Peggy went for it. She'd been a gal with standards – heck, her interest in Steve had proved that she knew a good catch when she saw one – and Howard had been rather feckless for her tastes. But if it really had been seventy years, Bucky could hardly blame Carter for deciding to move on and maybe the inventor had settled down eventually.

However, the soldier wasn’t entirely convinced and he watched Tony’s expression carefully as the other man rambled on. If he really was Howard’s son, Tony had definitely inherited the inventor’s inability to get to the point without a thousand tangents and despite his best efforts, Bucky soon found himself tuning out. Steve would pay attention – he always did – and indeed, the sergeant's thoughts snapped back into focus when Tony mentioned Hydra and his captain went stiff next to him.

While the blond had never been the type to hold a grudge, he'd made an exception for Hydra after Bucky had finally told him about what Zola did. Steve was probably beating himself up over his failure to catch the doctor and indeed, the other man's voice was tight with anger when he asked, “Hydra’s still around?”

“Captain… Hydra won the war,” was Tony’s answer, this one short sentence knocking Bucky for a loop. 

Steve wasn’t in any better shape, both men gaping in shock as Stark elaborated on Hydra’s victory. “No one's quite sure what happened, but as far as we've been able to things together, the story goes something like this: a few days after you fell, the Red Skull bombed half the planet and then his army conquered what was left. That’s why my parents started SHIELD – they wanted to keep fighting against Hydra and there was no one else to do the job.”

“So you’re like a resistance group or something? Why did you bother with us?” the soldier asked, eyeing their host suspiciously. Sure Steve was Captain America – and given Tony’s earlier words Bucky was ninety-nine percent sure that he had been an afterthought – but the fight must be going really badly if a supersoldier from the forties was SHIELD’s best shot. A presumed dead supersoldier at that.

Indeed, Bucky’s question seemed to knock the wind right out of Tony’s sails, the slightly manic air disappearing to reveal the tired soldier underneath. “Because we’re losing. It’s been seventy years since the Day of Fire and Hydra is as powerful as ever. So we need you; we need you to end this war before there’s nothing left to save.”

“I don’t know how much help we’d really be. It sounds like you’re fighting a different kind of war than the one we’re used to,” Steve said quietly and Bucky could tell that he'd decided to believe this lunacy. Of course, to be fair, the sniper was leaning that way himself since Tony’s despair was all but palpable.

“You’re Captain America; I’m pretty sure you'll learn if you put your mind to it. But even if you don't fight, your blood could give us the edge over our enemies. After all, I went looking for a corpse and I found a pair of supersoldiers so Erskine’s serum has proved its worth as far as I’m concerned.”

“What are you talking about? I’m not any kind of supersoldier,” Bucky said with a frown, the idea of comparing him to Captain America laughable at best. “I was already on the Continent by the time Steve here got zapped and let me tell you, seeing him was a surprise.”

“I – are you sure?” Tony asked. “Because Banner said that your blood definitely had traces of the serum – not as much as Steve's, but enough to keep you from freezing or bleeding out before we sewed you up. Even if they didn’t tell you what it was, the change should have been pretty obvious since you would have been healing a lot faster than you did before.”

“I'm a sniper, it’s not like I got shot as often as this pun-” The sergeant’s words cut off as he was struck by a sudden memory. It was Zola, the scientist staring down at his pet project with the horrible little smile that still haunted Bucky’s dreams. _'You're a survivor, Barnes, I admire that. None of my other subjects lasted half as long. So I am going to give you a gift that many men have dreamed of and perhaps you will be the success I have been searching for. Or you will burn like all the others and I will have to choose another lab rat from that pathetic mass of whining prisoners.'_

“Can you give us a minute?” the soldier heard distantly, Steve's voice recognizable even through the horror of memory. But all Bucky could see was the syringe coming toward him – the injection that had burned within his veins for days.

The sniper had been certain that death was coming for him and by the end, he'd begged for that release, his voice gone hoarse from screaming with the pain. Bucky’s only relief had been the knowledge that Steve was back in Brooklyn, his friend kept far away from the ugly realities of battle by the weakness in his lungs. 

No matter how much Steve had always hated his body's endless failures, Bucky had been glad for them once the war began. He had been glad that the blond would not be drafted and couldn't volunteer because the other man was the one constant in his life, the one good thing that Bucky had ever called his own. If the sniper had known what his friend was actually doing while he was there on Zola's table, he might have give up and so maybe ignorance truly was bliss after all.

“Hey, now, buddy, you're okay. Wherever you've gone, it's not real so just come back to me.” The soldier lashed out when a hand touched his arm, nearly socking Steve right in the jaw. But Bucky managed to adjust his aim before he added to Steve's bruises, even if the effort made him gasp with pain again. 

The sharp stab of agony sent him crumpling forward, Steve's arm the only thing that kept him from smacking face first into the bed, and for a moment, Bucky allowed himself to take comfort in his best friend's warmth.

But even now the soldier was supposed to be the strong one, the one that Captain America could trust to watch his back. So he used his one good arm to push himself upright, giving Steve a weak smile and a whispered, “I'm all right.”

“You sure? You were pretty out of it there,” the blond asked, hands twitching like he wanted to wrap Bucky in a hug again.

“Yeah, I just... It was Zola. He injected me with something when I was a prisoner,” Bucky muttered a little bitterly, fingers digging into the blankets on Steve's bed. “And I guess I might have been healing faster once you rescued me, but I never really thought about it. I was too busy worrying over your punk ass. So maybe Stark Jr. there is right and I am some second-rate Captain America knockoff.”

“Hey, now. You've never been second-rate in your life, Bucky,” Steve protested, pulling the sergeant back into his arms. “And I never thought I'd thank Zola for anything, but I don't know how I would have managed if I'd woken up alone.”

“You do seem to get stupider when I'm not around, don't you?” Bucky said with a half-smile, trying not to melt when the other man started stroking his hair absently. “I mean, I go off to Europe for a few months and you volunteer for some weird experiment that could have turned you into a bug. And don't even get me started on the tights.”

“I already told you, that outfit wasn't my idea, and you have to admit the new version wasn't all that bad,” Steve replied with a long-suffering sigh, though the quirk of his lips said that he was secretly amused by the sniper's needling. 

No one had ever believed Bucky when he told them that Captain America was a cantankerous son of a bitch beneath his goofy smile, not even the other Howling Commandos until they saw the truth firsthand. But there was something comforting about the familiar banter now that their world had been turned completely upside-down, everyone that they had ever known swallowed up by history. He and Steve were alone now, just the two of them against the world.

Only the sniper couldn't watch his friend's back the way he used to; with his arm gone, he would be a nothing but a liability and a faint cry of distress escaped Bucky's throat before he could silence it. Because he knew Steve; he knew that the blond would be leading the fight against Hydra and he couldn't lose him now.

“Bucky, what's wrong? Are you still in pain?” Steve asked, the concern in his voice making the sniper cringe.

He didn't want to talk about it; he didn't want to admit the true depths of his weakness to his friend. So he just shook his head when the other man asked again. “I'm fine. It's nothing.”

“Don't lie to me!” Steve burst out and the sergeant jerked back in surprise at his vehemence. “Bucky, you're not fine. You're so far from fine that it's not even funny, we both are, so will you just stop trying to pretend? You always do this; you laugh off your pain like it doesn't even matter and I'm sick to death of it.”

For a second, Bucky could only gape; Steve had never yelled at him like that before. He'd been angry, sure, and sometimes bitter back when his body always failed him, but now his eyes were blazing and the soldier could hardly believe that his friend cared this much about his injuries.

Bucky wasn't worth it. He was just a two-bit dock worker with a knack for the piano and sweet-talking dames. He was good with rifles and good at killing people, those skills the only thing that made him valuable. Because Bucky was just a soldier, a queer who wasn't even brave enough to admit his feelings to the man he was in love with, and Steve was finally going to see the coward underneath his skin.

Steve was finally going to leave him now that Bucky was too damaged to follow in his footsteps anymore. But he'd seen this coming; in truth, the sergeant had seen this coming ever since his friend was first turned into Captain America. 

So Bucky just squared his shoulders and tried to smile as he whispered, “I'm not- It doesn't- You don't need me anymore.”

“God, you're an idiot sometimes,” the other man told him, his anger disappearing as fast as it had come. “I infiltrated a Hydra base for you back when I still had tights and go-go boots; you really think I'm going to abandon you if you admit you're freaking out?”

Bucky couldn't give the blond an answer, not when he knew that the truth would be disappointing; Steve always did have too much faith in him. So the sergeant stayed silent even as his friend read the answer off his face.

“You don't have to be strong for me all the time; you never did,” Steve said with a tired sigh and Bucky wanted so desperately to believe that could be true. “You're my best friend. You're _everything_ and I wish you'd let me help you when you're hurt. I want to help; I want to be there for you like you've always been for me so will you just _tell_ me what is eating you?”

“I just... Look at me,” Bucky bit out, an awkward shrug drawing attention to the space where his left arm had been. “I can't hold a gun like this; I can't even work a fucking radio so how the hell am I supposed to fight? Hydra would laugh me right off the battlefield.”

“ _Bucky,_ ” Steve said plaintively, the soldier ducking his head at the pain in those blue eyes. “Bucky, you don't have to fight. Sure the world is different now – sounds like it's all FUBAR honestly – but you've more than earned the right to sit this battle out. Hell, I should have sent you home after I pulled you off Zola's table; I was just too selfish to let you go again.”

“Don't you fucking say that,” Bucky snarled and this time it was Steve's turn to stare as the soldier jabbed his finger into the blond's chest. “You think I didn't know exactly what I was doing? You think I wasn't terrified to head back into the war after everything I'd seen? But there was no way in hell that I was going to let you fight without someone there to watch your back, someone who cared more about Steve Rogers than Captain fucking America. I made my decision and I made it freely so don't you dare trivialize my choice like that. Not when you're going to jump back into battle like it's still 1945 and I'm the one who's going to be left behind this time.”

“Bucky, I'm not... I'm not going to leave you. Why would you think that?” Steve asked and if Bucky hadn't been so pissed, he would have crumpled at the pleading in his voice. “But I can't just sit back and do nothing while Hydra hurts innocents.”

“Why the fuck not? That's exactly what you expect me to do and you've earned a break as much as I have. Just give Stark a pint of your blood, let SHIELD make its own damn supersoldiers, and sit this one out with me.” Even as he said it, Bucky knew that Steve would never agree; his bleeding heart had only gotten worse after Captain America was born. Maybe it was because the other man finally had the strength to _do_ something and while this selflessness was part of Stevie's charm, Bucky hated it right now. 

So the soldier's tone was almost despairing when he asked, “Why can't you be selfish just this once?” and he couldn't be too surprised when, “Because this is all my fault!” was the reply.

Of course Steve was feeling guilty; he probably blamed himself for Bucky's arm along with Hydra's victory and the soldier found his anger fading at the thought. It was replaced with a sort of fond exasperation and the familiar urge to put the light back in his captain's eyes

“Damn it, Stevie,” Bucky sighed, laying his hand on the blond's shoulder until he finally looked up. “You are not responsible for what the Red Skull did, you hear me? Sure you would have tried to stop him and maybe you would have succeeded, but maybe you would have failed and died for nothing anyway. There's no way to know what would have happened and you can't be blamed for falling after me.”

“But that's just it, Bucky. I didn't fall; I jumped.” 

“You _what?!_ ”

For a second the sniper was sure that he was hallucinating, pain and stress making him hear things that weren't there. But Steve's guilty expression was the same one he always wore when he did something reckless and knew that Bucky would be angry, so all he could do was shake his head in disbelief. 

“Why would you do that, you moron?”

“Because you fell,” Steve said, looking at Bucky as though this should be obvious. “You fell and I couldn't let you die. So I jumped because then at least we'd go together if we had to go at all.”

“Christ, Stevie. I wasn't worth that,” Bucky said, running his hand through his hair uncomfortably. “I've never been worth that so you gotta stop risking death for me.”

“Not until you stop throwing yourself between me and danger like I'm still five feet tall, because I refuse to live in a world without you in it and you're not bulletproof,” the other man retorted fiercely. “Seriously, I don't know how you can be so good at reading people and still be completely oblivious to the way I feel about you. I love you, okay? I love you and I need you to survive.”

He sounded so earnest but he couldn't really mean it and for once Bucky found himself without anything to say. Steve couldn't be in love with him; he was supposed to find a nice girl and live happily ever after no matter how much the sniper hated to see his best friend smile at anyone but him.

So he stayed silent until the hope in Steve's eyes began to dim, the blond letting his shoulders slump with a defeated sigh. “You don't have to say anything; I know you don't feel the same. But I wish you would take better care of yourself. You're my best friend and you matter more than anyone, even Peggy, though I really loved her too.”

 _Holy shit, he's serious,_ Bucky realized and in that instant all his hesitation disappeared. Because if this were actually real, if he could actually have this, then none of his doubts meant a damn.

So he lurched forward, fingers tangling in Steve's hair and pulling his head down. Bucky missed his first try since he wasn't used to leaning up for kisses, their noses knocking together awkwardly before the sniper managed to get things tilted right. But then their lips met and the other man's mouth was as sweet as Bucky had always imagined it would be

At first Steve was tense against him, the blond's eyes going wide with surprise when the soldier reeled him in. However, Bucky could be patient for this and he just waited with their mouths barely pressed together until the other man gave in. 

Steve response was enthusiastic if not particularly practiced and he followed Bucky's lead as the kiss deepened gradually. The sniper wanted to savor this in case his friend came to his senses; he wanted to remember the soft slide of Steve's lips under his and the way that the other man moaned against his mouth. But the long years of denial were eroding his self-control and eventually they left sweetness far behind. Instead the two men pressed close together, the ache of Bucky's wounds nothing compared to the feel of Steve's skin beneath his hand. 

Somewhere underneath the haze of desire, Bucky knew that he should stop; he should step back and make them talk about this before it went too far. But even though this was hardly the time or place for romance, he couldn't seem to stop kissing Steve long enough to speak.

So he was almost grateful for the interruption when Tony slammed back through the door saying, “Are you all right? Your biometrics are going haywire in he-,” the sound of his voice sending the two men scrambling apart. Bucky would have been grateful except for a sudden flash of panic; he'd finally managed to drag Steve down with him.

Because Tony must have realized exactly what the pair was doing and they'd definitely worn out their welcome now. Bucky would probably be thrown out on the streets for Hydra to take care of while SHIELD tried to recreate Captain America until he ran out of blood to give.

The sniper was going to lose Steve, lose everything because of this, but he would die before letting Hydra get hold of him again. So Bucky grabbed for the syringe that he had brought in with him, the needle lying on the sheets where he'd forgotten it. He honestly wasn't sure whether he planned to use it on himself or his attackers; he just knew that he needed to be ready when that moment came.

But when Bucky finally met Tony's eyes, the man seemed more embarrassed than disgusted, and the sergeant didn't know what to do with that. Tony should be shouting for the guards not grinning sheepishly and when he finally did speak, his words might as well have been Italian for all the sense they made.

“Sorry about that, I guess I should have knocked. Though you probably shouldn't be doing anything too acrobatic with your injuries so try to tone it down a notch, will you?” Tony asked. The man seemed sincere about his worry even if SHIELD only needed Steve for his abilities and once the pair gave him confused nods of agreement, he broke out in a grin. “Good on you. Now, if you promise to keep it in your pants, I'll see about getting another bed shoved in here and once the Doc clears you for exercise, you can make with the hanky panky to your hearts' content. I'll find you a nice room away from everyone else where you won't have to worry about the screams.”

“Are you serious? Because if you're mocking us, I promise you I will cusdkfjnbrvfdkvn.” Steve's hand muffled the rest of Bucky's threat before he could complete it, though the soldier did his best to get his point across with eyes alone.

“Sorry about him. We're just a little surprised that you're taking this so well,” the blond said, ever the reasonable one in the face of things that made no sense. While Bucky tended to come out swinging, Steve usually attempted reason before the inevitable fist fight and that was one thing his transformation hadn't changed.

But if anything, Tony seemed just as confused as they were by this whole conversation, staring at Steve with an odd look on his face. It was the expression Howard used to make when confronted with a particularly troublesome conundrum and it took a minute for his face to clear.

“Oh, right. You guys were totally illegal back in the day, weren't you?” Tony asked in the same tone of voice that people used to talk about kings or dinosaurs. “Well, you don't have to worry about that anymore. Sure Hydra still hates you, but it would have hated you anyway, and most of the Resistance doesn't care. SHIELD needs people who can fight and your private life is none of my business as far as I'm concerned. Though I suppose this does explain a few things about my mother's policies.”

While this made a practical sort of sense, it still seemed far too easy after all the years of hiding and the knowledge that his feelings might get him killed someday. People didn't change that fast, they just didn't, and Bucky hadn't survived the war and Hydra and Zola's fucking table to get jumped by some bigots like the ones he'd grown up with. 

So he ignored the little thread of hope that Tony's words had lit within him, the hope that he would finally be able to love Steve openly. Maybe it was true, maybe seventy years and Armageddon had wiped out old prejudices, but the expression on Steve's face was terrifying anyway. Because the other man was clearly ready to trust in Tony's promises given the way that he was smiling and Bucky could practically see visions of white picket fences running through his mind.

Steve was picturing their happy ending when the story had barely even started and they had all of Hydra to wade through before the tale was done. Even if Tony spoke the truth and men like them were no longer treated as abominations, they would have no peace as long as Hydra reigned.

The war had gone on without them and despite the words that Bucky had said in anger, he would never ask Steve to sit it out. Instead the sniper would do what he always did; he would protect his captain from anyone who wished to harm him and even if he couldn't follow Captain America into battle any longer, Bucky would damn well be there to greet him when he came home again.


	4. Flesh

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which I earn my rating.

Steve and Bucky spent the next week confined to bed rest, something that neither man was very pleased about. There was just no way around it, convalescence was boring, and Bucky still kicked Steve's ass at poker nine times out of ten.

But even if losing sucked and their room seemed tiny once Tony brought in another bed, Steve was glad his friend was there to keep him company. Truthfully he didn't want to let Bucky out of his sight for a year at least. Not when he kept having nightmares about the other man's broken body and what might have happened if he hadn't jumped as well. Not until Bucky stopped staring off into space when he thought the blond wasn't looking, that empty hopelessness worse than any frown.

The other man wasn't supposed to look like that, torn and bitter and so fucking lost, and Steve would have done anything to take his doubts away. He would have done anything to make it better but he could hardly sew Bucky's arm back on his body and his friend had never been one for platitudes.

They'd survived the fall from Zola's train only to wake up in a world ravaged by war and hatred, one that was completely different from the life that they had known. Things Steve had always taken for granted – telephones, voting, even bananas – were suddenly relics of the past and he often felt like he was speaking another language when Tony was around. Although, to be fair, the man sometimes was speaking another language since SHIELD's agents used a strange mishmash of French and English when talking amongst themselves.

While Steve and Bucky had only been officially introduced to two members of SHIELD, just Doctor Banner and Tony Stark himself, there were always agents dropping by. Apparently Captain America was a hero to the Resistance and the discovery of a living breathing supersoldier had most of SHIELD gossiping like mad.

The constant stream of visitors was annoying at first since Steve just wanted to spend some time with Bucky, but he did owe these folks his life. So instead of complaining, the blond drew on the skills he'd learned with USO, smiling widely as he shook hands and discussed past missions with anyone who asked.

In return, SHIELD's agents granted him their stories and the more the captain heard, the more he was determined to see Hydra's leaders fall. Everyone in SHIELD had been hurt by Hydra somehow, their friends and relatives killed or captured and tortured for their names. Although, perhaps the worst deaths were the ones lacking any rhyme or reason beyond random cruelty, Hydra allowing the worst of its soldiers' impulses to run unchecked by consequence.

Faced with such overwhelming sorrow, Steve could only listen and feel inadequate. But eventually he came to understand that listening was a gift in its own right and the stories of his feats gave people hope that things might change. Hope was the reason that SHIELD's agents remembered Captain America; hope was the reason they still cared enough to want his autograph.

A few agents even asked for Bucky's – the sergeant was a living, breathing Howling Commando after all – and the question always made his best friend grin. Which was the only reason Steve allowed the other man to regale their guests with every embarrassing story he could think of, that and the way Bucky made it up to him later, throwing his good arm around Steve's neck and kissing him until he forgot about his embarrassment.

The captain still couldn't believe that he was actually allowed to touch now, that he could kiss the edges of Bucky's smile like he'd always wanted to. Steve was never going to get used to the way that Bucky felt against him, the other man’s lips soft and warm beneath his own.

Although they hadn't progressed past kissing, the blond couldn't stop thinking about it. He couldn't stop wondering how two men actually had intercourse – in his extremely limited experience it mostly involved a lot of grinding – even as he trusted Bucky to figure something out. Honestly, the curiosity was driving Steve crazy and the fact that his friend never bothered to put a shirt on these days wasn't helping anything. Because the blond kept getting distracted by the play of muscles in the other man's back when Tony was trying to tell them about the current century and SHIELD's files couldn't hold a candle to the feel of Bucky’s hips beneath his hands.

Not that Bucky was any less affected judging by the heat in his eyes, but the sergeant hid it better when other people were around. He slapped a smile on his face before trading quips with Tony, and it felt like a revelation when Steve realized how often he had seen that same grin before.

That was his friend's “God I want to kiss you but I'm not allowed to” smile and the blond had seen it long before Erskine's serum created Captain America. He had seen it back when he was still a skinny scrawny invalid who probably wasn't going to survive the winter, which meant that Bucky really did love him after all.

This wasn't just lust for Steve's new body; it wasn't just an attempt to make Steve happy in any way he could. Bucky honestly loved him and that was the only thing making their situation bearable.

Although the Red Skull had bombed the world and Steve still felt like he should have stopped this somehow, at least Hydra hadn't managed to destroy everything that the captain cared about. At least there was still love and hope and friendship and even though their chances of survival weren't high, Steve couldn't stop himself from thinking about the future anyway. Because the blond could stand the sorrow for the chance to love his fellow openly and finally get the picket fence that he'd always dreamed about.

Of course, Steve wouldn't get anything unless SHIELD defeated Hydra and the more he learned about their war, the more he hoped that Tony had some sort of master plan. Because a frontal assault wasn't going to cut it – not with the kind of power Hydra could command – and Captain America no longer had a team.

He didn't even have his sniper, not with Bucky's left arm missing, and while the other man refused to talk about it, Steve knew the thought still weighed on him. Bucky had always protected the blond; he took that job very seriously and nothing would convince him that his captain didn't need protecting anymore. Or rather, that Steve didn't need protecting but still needed Bucky anyway. He would always need Bucky and it had nothing to do with the sergeant's skill at shooting or his willingness to throw himself between Steve and danger constantly.

Truthfully, Bucky's lack of self-preservation terrified the blond more than any Hydra weapon and he was determined to ram some sense into his fellow's skull eventually. He couldn't lose the other man – he wouldn't – and if Bucky hadn't survived the fall, Tony would be talking to a very different man right now.

So while part of Steve hated the thought of going into battle without the sergeant on his six, the other part was glad that he would have to sit it out. Because at least his friend would be safe from further injury and the captain would fight twice as hard to return home to Bucky afterwards.

But Steve didn't know how to say any of that without sounding like an ungrateful asshole and the last thing he wanted to do was disparage his fellow's sacrifice. So the captain just lost ungracefully at poker, listened to stories about his early years in Brooklyn, and told Bucky that he loved him as often as the other man would listen to the words. Steve also gave too much blood to Doctor Banner, held his fellow's hand whenever something threatened to give him another flashback, and kissed him goodnight just because he finally could.

Bucky was still a twitchy about showing affection in public, staying firmly on the side of friendship when someone else was in the room. However, Steve could hardly blame him for his wariness even though he was determined not to share it and when they were alone, the other man was as sweet as sweet could be. 

His fellow had always been a charmer, but this was a Bucky that Steve knew no one else had ever seen. This Bucky smiled at Steve like the blond was his greatest treasure and he couldn't believe his feelings were actually returned.

“I do love you, you know that, right?” the sergeant asked while curled around Steve one evening, right arm thrown across his chest. Their position was an echo of those cold winter nights back in Brooklyn when Bucky had been the only thing keeping the blond from freezing, and Steve could definitely get used to this again. “I kind of failed at saying it the first time, but you’ve always been the best thing in my life.”

“I know, Bucky, and you’re the best in mine,” Steve replied, stroking gentle fingers through his fellow’s hair. “I won't promise that we're going to survive this, but I can promise that I'm going to fight like hell to get back to you again.”

“Of course you are,” Bucky said, looking up at his captain with a hint of a smirk, and if the corners of his smile trembled slightly, Steve wouldn't mention it. “Because I'm going to kick your ass if you let Hydra kill you when I'm not around.”

And that right there was the heart of the problem. That was everything the other man refused to say and the truth of his desperation was too raw for Steve to heal with words or promises. 

So he just bent his head to kiss Bucky, trying to say everything with the press of lips on skin. Because no matter how guilty Steve felt about it, he was still going to leave the sergeant behind when he went to battle Hydra. He would fight and for Bucky, he would destroy them utterly.

\---

Doctor Banner finally cleared the pair to leave the medical wing two days later and Tony gave them the grand tour of SHIELD Grenoble on the way to their new room. To be honest, the base didn't look all that impressive but there was a comforting familiarity in its cracked concrete and mishmash fixtures; these were the sort of practical accouterments that soldiers learned to love. 

Steve and Bucky also received an official introduction to many of the agents who had visited during their recovery, a parade of names and faces passing by. The captain was never going to keep them all straight, but a few people stood out from the crowd.

There was Natasha Romanoff, a terrifying redheaded dame who reminded him of Peggy Carter; Phil Coulson, who might actually be their biggest fan; and François Morita, eldest grandson of the Howling Commando who had passed some years before. However, it was the casual introduction of a cheerful brunet painter as Morita’s fellow that made Bucky sit up and take notice, the other man finally starting to believe no one was going to jump him if he held Steve's hand sometimes.

Steve rather liked Frederick since the man had an artist's eye for color and they were deep in a discussion of shading techniques when Tony dragged him off again. Apparently such abrupt departures were normal since the other agent took this in stride, waving farewell with a promise to show the captain his studio sometime.

From there it was laboratories and weapon caches, Tony pointing out his security measures like a little kid showing off for his parents and that thought made Steve pause awkwardly. Because in another life, this man might have been his son instead of Howard's and his very existence made everything a touch surreal. He was living proof of all the years that had passed by Steve and Bucky and the captain probably would have been more skeptical of SHIELD's story without Tony here.

However, the blond could see echoes of Peggy and Howard in their son's expressions; he could see Peggy's smile and Howard's endless excitement about new technology. So Steve couldn't doubt the truth before his eyes and he was glad that his friends had found some happiness during SHIELD's long war.

Although, the captain could have done without the endless manic chatter and Steve had seen Bucky's eyes glaze over five minutes back. But Tony finally seemed to be winding down or at least running out of toys to show them, and a few more minutes later, he stopped before another door.

“Okay, Capsicle and Barnesicle, welcome to your crash pad,” Tony announced and Steve really needed to have a chat about the nicknames before they got out of hand.

Or maybe not since the monikers made Bucky snicker quietly. His fellow's smile had always been infectious and Steve didn't see enough of it these days. No matter how annoying he found the nicknames, he could live with anything that made Bucky laugh like that and even the sight of their new room couldn't dim the glow he felt. Sure it was a concrete box at heart, but both soldiers had slept in far worse places and he was pretty sure the mattress had been custom-made for them.

Seriously, the bed took up half the room, just enough space on either side of it for a cheap dresser, a floor lamp, and a door on the far wall. However, complaining about the lack of space was the last thing on Steve’s mind after Bucky sat down on the mattress and let out the most pornographic moan that he had ever heard.

“Fuck, Steve. You have to try this thing,” the sergeant said, sprawling out on the bed with a sigh of bliss that went straight to the blond's groin.

“And that's my cue to leave,” Tony cut in before Steve could take more than one step toward the bed. A timely interruption since, truthfully, he had completely forgotten that the other man was there. “Now, I know neither of you have gotten laid in seven decades, but try not to pull anything when you get your freaky on. We've got a busy day tomorrow and I need you both in tip-top shape when we start testing out your skills.”

Tony pulled the door shut with a click and Steve stared after him with a bemused smile for a moment until another moan snapped his attention back where it belonged.

“Okay, seriously, is it really that amazing?” the blond asked, walking over to the bed where Bucky was still wriggling happily. The sergeant was making the same noises that he used to make over his first cup of real coffee after a stint out in the field and Steve still found the sound completely irresistible. Only an extreme exercise in self-control had kept him on his feet thus far but the other man didn't seem to appreciate his restraint like it deserved.

Instead, Bucky just smirked up at his captain and then reached out to grab his hand.

“Why don't you come down here and find out?” Bucky said, trying to pull Steve down onto the bed. He resisted at first since he was still wary of the other man's injuries, but Bucky was persistent and the blond had never been able to withstand that grin for long.

So he sprawled out next to his fellow, lascivious thoughts momentarily derailed when his shoulders touched the bed.

“Holy crap, this _is_ amazing,” Steve said, stretching out on the mattress with a groan. It was literally the softest thing he'd ever felt, like someone had stuffed Heaven into a sheet and made a mattress from it, and he just wanted to roll around for days.

Though maybe with a few less clothes on, Steve's half-built fantasies rushing back in force when Bucky leaned over him. 

“You should have learned to trust me by now, Stevie,” the other man murmured, eyes tracing Steve's face like he wanted to burn this moment into his memory. Though it was the wonder that made the blond's heart swell to bursting, all of Bucky's smirking bravado doing little to hide the sheer joy in his gaze. “When have I ever led you wrong?”

“Oh, I can think of a few times. But I'll give you the benefit of the doubt for now,” Steve replied before wrapping his hand around Bucky's neck and pulling his fellow into another kiss.

Kissing Bucky was like coming home and while the blond still wasn't sure what he was doing, this was a damn good start. So Steve focused on driving his fellow insane with teeth and tongue, licking his way into Bucky's mouth and nipping at his lips. He wanted to savor every inch of him, drink him in until all he could taste was that deep smoky flavor, and he couldn't stop himself from moaning at the thought.

Or maybe it was the way that the other man's hips were grinding down against him, their cocks sliding together with every thrust. It was almost painful with the rough fabric of their pants caught between them but fixing that would have required letting Bucky go. 

So Steve just dragged his fellow down again, tangling his fingers in the other man's hair to get the angle right. Because the wet slide of lips was everything he'd ever wanted, his hips rocking up without his conscious thought. The blond didn't think he'd ever been this hard in his life, not even in that week-long stretch after the serum when he'd been caught off guard by his body suddenly demanding things that he’d never had the energy to want before.

But he hadn't had Bucky back then, his fellow's muscled back taut and smooth beneath his hands. He hadn't had the other man's rough stubble tracing a searing line against his cheek as Steve tried to tug him closer, the sergeant's remaining hand working its way down his captain's chest teasingly.

Bucky had a lot more coordination than the blond was managing and his fingers were soon tugging at the waistband of Steve's pants. There was a bit of cursing involved since the angle was different than the other man was used to but years of practice at undoing bra straps one-handed eventually paid off. The captain couldn't even be jealous of all those women anymore when Bucky's fingers closed around his dick, sure and strong and far too skilled at this.

All he could do was hold on, Steve's hands digging into the sergeant's hips hard enough to bruise as he gasped against his neck. He would feel guilty about the marks later when Bucky wasn't stroking his cock with firm intent, gun calluses catching roughly on his skin.

The other man kept the rhythm slow at first, a little hesitant until he realized that Steve was moaning at pretty much everything he did. It would have been embarrassing if Bucky didn't look so delighted by the revelation, doing his best to pull the most obscene noises out of his captain's throat. He seemed determined to find the perfect stroke, twisting his wrist a little differently each time until he finally made Steve scream.

“Oh my God, _Bucky_ ,” the blond shouted, back arching off the bed. “Oh my God, do that again.”

So Bucky did, pupils blown wide with lust as he watched Steve fall apart beneath his hand. The man was gorgeous, giving himself over to the pleasure with an unselfconscious abandon that threatened to drive the sergeant mad. Because he knew that no one had ever touched his friend like this; no one else had ever seen Steve's face twisted with desire and this thought ignited something hot and possessive in his chest.

Captain America might belong to the world, but this belonged to Bucky and right now that seemed like a fair trade.

“Fuck, Stevie. Do you have any idea what you do to me?” the sergeant murmured and Steve would never get tired of hearing that name on Bucky's lips. But it didn't seem right that his fellow was still able to say anything when his only coherent thought was _touch me more_. So Steve dragged his hands down the other man’s chest, clumsy fingers working the buttons of Bucky's pants.

It seemed to take forever to get them open, the blond continually distracted by the warm press of lips against his neck. Because the sergeant couldn't seem to stop touching Steve, that clever mouth sucking a line of hickeys into his fellow’s skin for everyone to see. 

Each possessive touch sent sparks shooting down Steve's spine and he had never realized that anything could be wired straight to his dick like that. So his fingers kept slipping on the buttons as he arched up into Bucky, wanton moans echoing off the concrete of the walls. But eventually Steve managed to find his target, Bucky's dick hot and heavy in his hand. While it threw him for a second since the feel of another man’s cock was both strange and familiar, his fellow’s unbridled moan was enough to make him persevere.

Steve gave a cautious squeeze, the sergeant's whole body jerking against him and it didn't take long for him to find a rhythm after that. Bucky liked it slow, a little rougher than his captain, and when the blond dragged his thumb across the tip of his fellow's cock, he thought that Bucky might pass out. 

Because his murmured words were fast becoming gibberish, broken moans panted into his captain's neck. Bucky was kneeling over him now, catching Steve's lips in another kiss as he kept pulling at his cock, and the blond returned the favor, their hands knocking together in a filthy, sweaty mess. It was slick and awkward and perfect, Steve's free hand tangling in Bucky's hair again as they rutted on the bed, moans muffling the slap of skin on skin.

Everything was blending together: the heat and pleasure and endless litany of endearments that Bucky couldn't seem to stop; the other man's voice gone gravelly and shattered with desire, dick hot and pulsing in his palm. All it took was a few more strokes and then the sergeant was arching taut above him, head thrown back as he cried out Steve's name.

The wet gush of Bucky's seed across his hand brought everything into sharp focus, Steve wringing the last drops from the other man's cock as he watched his face. He wanted to remember this; he wanted to remember the way that Bucky looked, sweaty and disheveled and so fucking gorgeous when he came. 

Steve was definitely going to remember the way that his fellow smiled almost shyly; the fond tilt of his lips as he stared down at the blond. Although, perhaps he should have been paying more attention to the wicked glint in Bucky's eyes since the sergeant's next stroke caught him by surprise.

A few more quick jerks took Steve to the edge and dropped him off it, his world narrowing to the heat around his cock and the pleasure crashing over him. Then he collapsed back onto the mattress, heart hammering in his chest like he'd just run a marathon. But no jog had ever made him feel as good as this. Steve was smiling so hard that his cheeks had started hurting, limbs loose and sprawling on the bed.

“That was amazing,” he muttered, pressing a sloppy kiss to the side of Bucky's cheek as the other man grinned proudly down at him. “Why the hell haven't we been doing that for years?”

“Well, you probably would have passed out halfway through back in the old days,” was the first joking reply before the sergeant's smile flattened out. “Besides, even if I hadn't been too much of a coward to admit that I loved you, you've always been out of my league. Hell, I'm still not sure what you see in me.”

“Don't worry, Bucky. As it turns out, I am a huge fan of slumming it,” Steve replied, deciding that he was in far too good a mood to tackle his fellow's insecurities right now. Besides, he was tired and this bed was so very comfortable.

“Hey, punk. Don't fall asleep on me.” 

The captain grunted when Bucky poked him but he refused to open his eyes and eventually his fellow just wriggled free.

“Quit your griping; I ain't gonna wake up glued to you just because you were too lazy to move,” the other man retorted when Steve grumbled disgruntledly at the loss of his human blanket, the blond already missing Bucky's weight in his arms. “You can have your pillow back as soon as I clean up the mess we made.”

The other man was true to his word, wiping off Steve's stomach with a few rough swipes of a washcloth before tossing the towel back into the bathroom to deal with another day. Then he shimmied out of his pants – something that the captain did, in fact, open his eyes for since he would never be too tired to watch that. In fact, if Bucky hadn't followed the move with an enormous yawn, the blond might have considered trying for round two immediately.

But instead he just kicked off his own pants and scooted over to make room for his fellow, not that moving was really necessary on this ridiculously large bed. Bucky still seemed to appreciate the gesture, curling against the captain's side with a happy sigh.

He must really have been tired since he was out less than a minute later, face mashed awkwardly into Steve's collarbone. Honestly, the other man was probably going to wake up with some crazy lines on his cheek in the morning, but he looked so adorable that Steve couldn't bear to make him move. So the blond just wrapped an arm around Bucky's shoulders and pressed a kiss to the top of his head before drifting off to the familiar sound of snoring in his ear.

\---

For once his sleep was peaceful, the recurring nightmares of Bucky falling to his death chased off by the warm skin beneath his hands. Although, nice as it was, Steve had second thoughts about the whole sleeping naked situation when Tony burst into their room at the ass crack of dawn. 

“Rise and shine, soldiers. I needed you down in the lab twenty minutes ago,” the man shouted, seemingly oblivious to the eyeful that Bucky flashed him when the sergeant turned to glare. “Chop chop, time’s a wasting and I don't have time to spare.”

Tony seemed content to stand there waiting until both men got dressed, his expression giving Steve flashbacks to his army training days. So the captain didn’t bother to argue, just reached over to poke Bucky until his eyes actually stayed open for more than a few seconds at a time. His fellow had never been a morning person, any interruption before noon greeted with disgruntlement and growls as long as Steve had known him, and that hadn’t changed in this new century.

Though Bucky wasn’t too tired to grin a little smugly when Steve threw off his sheet and Tony raised one impressed eyebrow, “Damn, Barnes. You don’t mess around do you? Cap looks like he’s been mauled.”

Steve looked down at his chest and discovered that, if anything, Tony's words were an understatement because he had hickeys _everywhere._ Truthfully, he looked like a leopard and he felt his skin flushing with embarrassment. While the blond wasn’t ashamed of his relationship with Bucky, far from it, he didn't necessarily want everyone knowing _exactly_ what they’d been up to last night. 

Some things were supposed to be private and Steve was actually a little surprised that Bucky was so calm about this now. But either his fellow had finally accepted that society had changed or his possessiveness was stronger than his fear. Probably a little of both since the sergeant had always had a bit of a jealous streak where Steve was concerned. Which was stupid, really, since he had been head over heels for Bucky for as long as he could remember and no one else had ever wanted to talk to him before the serum anyway.

However, no one ever claimed that love was rational and on further contemplation, Steve could see the appeal of leaving a few marks. Because Bucky was his now and everyone else would have to learn to keep their damn hands off.

Including Tony, who was watching them both far too appreciatively for the captain’s taste. While he didn’t think the other man was seriously interested, being ogled still made Steve uncomfortable and he pulled his shirt on a little faster than he might have otherwise. The blond was just glad that SHIELD had given each of them a change of clothes when they were discharged from medical so that he didn't have to throw on the dirty garments from the night before.

 _Next time we'll have to get naked first,_ Steve thought, feeling a little guilty about the laundry they were leaving on the floor. But he couldn't regret it when Bucky caught his eye, the other man's smile making his heart thump wildly, and the only thing that the captain wanted to do was go back to bed again.

“Did you manage to fuck each other stupid last night or can we get on with it?” Tony asked when the two men stood there grinning at each other for too long. “Because I wasn't kidding about the ticking clock.”

“Yes, of course. Sorry. Whatever you need,” Steve said even as his cheeks started burning again. He was going to have to learn how to look at Bucky without smiling like an idiot if he wanted to be able to function with any kind of normalcy, but Steve was starting to think that he would just have to live with blushing constantly.

Because it was taking all his strength to keep his lips from curving and he lost the fight when Bucky sidled next to him. 

“Shall we, then?” his fellow asked, holding out his arm like he was escorting Steve to a dance. Now that Bucky had had his hand down the blond's pants, he apparently felt the need to be a gentleman, and Steve had to admit that he was a little charmed.

Bucky had always been a good date, his manners fine enough that he could pass in high society when he'd wanted to. This was usually when Steve was struggling to make ends meet in the winter; his friend would find himself a nice girl who wanted a bit of danger and swan along to fancy parties in her wake. Bucky always left his date feeling like a princess even as he filled his pockets with expensive delicacies and Steve should have realized how the other man felt long ago. Because his fellow had always come straight to him with his prizes, laying everything out on the table and entertaining the blond with stories about the people he had seen.

Steve had been too wrapped up in his own doubts to see the obvious but now he fully intended to enjoy Bucky's chivalry to the fullest. So Steve ignored Tony's smirk and linked his arm with his fellow's before gesturing at Stark to lead the way.

With Bucky strutting alongside him, Steve couldn't feel embarrassed about the hickeys peeking up over the collar of his shirt. Instead the captain just felt proud that he was lucky enough to call this man his fellow and he met the surprised stares of the agents who crossed their path with a smug grin of his own. That smile said: “Damn right, he's mine,” and the captain thought that he'd be wearing it pretty often from now on. 

But, of course, there was still work to be done and his mood turned more serious when SHIELD's lab came into view.

Doctor Banner was there already, a familiar array of vials set out on the countertop along with a wide variety of equipment that Steve couldn't hope to recognize. He didn't even try, not when his only major encounter with serious medical science had involved Vita-rays and iron plating instead of these complicated machines and electricity. 

However, the captain did recognize the frustration on Banner's face quite clearly and he knew that the attempts to recreate Erskine's serum must not be going well. It seemed strange that seventy years of scientific advancements couldn't compare to one man's genius, but perhaps that was the problem. 

Maybe the world had moved too fast and the answers that SHIELD sought were locked away in older technologies. Maybe the answer was Vita-rays and iron plating after all.

But apparently Steve and Bucky weren't there to aid Banner's experiments because the doctor just nodded a distracted greeting before Tony led the soldiers through another door in the back wall of the lab. It opened into a large enclosed room, a training area by the looks of it, where Natasha and François were waiting with an impressive display of weaponry.

“What are we doing here?” the captain asked, letting go of Bucky's arm as he looked around the room.

Something about this place was making Steve twitchy, his nerves jangling as though an enemy were about to ambush him. Although, in truth, this might have been due to the narrow-eyed stare that Natasha pinned him with.

“We need to test your abilities if you're going to fight Hydra; we don't want to lose you in the first battle and warfare has changed a lot while you were sleeping,” the agent told him coldly, gesturing to the weapons at her side. The woman really didn't seem to like him and one of these days Steve would have to find out what her problem was. Though maybe the agent was just worried about Tony's willingness to rest all of SHIELD's hopes on a myth like Captain America.

That had been Bucky's opinion when Steve mentioned Natasha's distance and the sergeant had always been better at understanding people than his captain was. Steve had tried to see the best in everyone even before the serum and while that helped make Captain America inspiring, it also gave him certain blind spots that his fellow didn't have.

As long as Bucky wasn't concerned about Natasha's glaring, Steve would give her the benefit of the doubt for now. Even if the sight of the agent with a pistol made his hands itch for the comforting weight of his shield in his hands.

“If you're expecting any fancy moves from this guy, you're going to be sorely disappointed,” Bucky said, his chuckle neatly puncturing the silence before it could grow too serious. “He only had a week of basic training before they shipped him off to do his dancing act and the rest of us didn't get much more than that. Hell, my sniper training consisted of being handed a rifle by my CO and told to shoot at Krauts.”

“All the more reason to test your captain's level,” Natasha replied and Steve hadn't known she could sound any less impressed with him. “I need to know what you're capable of before Morita and I can make the best use of your skills. And if you're as bad as Barnes here claims, SHIELD will have a lot to teach you both.”

“Teach him, you mean,” Bucky said, shifting his weight awkwardly. “I'm not going to be infiltrating a lot of Hydra bases with my arm like this.”

“You can still shoot a gun, can't you? They’re all ready to fire so take your pick,” the agent said, gesturing at the array of weapons by her side and the sergeant's eyes lit up. Bucky had always liked guns as much as he didn't like to use them without reason and firearms had only grown sleeker through the years.

So the other man only hesitated for a second before stepping up to the table, reaching out to heft a pistol in his hand. Steve could see the change in Bucky as soon as he picked it up, his posture altering to reveal some of his old confidence, and the blond hadn’t realized how much he’d missed that until now. This would be good for his fellow so the captain settled back to enjoy the show, taking the earmuffs that Tony handed him as Natasha flicked a switch to bring the targets out.

Bucky's first shot went wide but before either agent could say anything, the sergeant shifted his stance slightly and placed the next five bullets squarely in the target’s head.

“Not bad,” Natasha said grudgingly and Steve could have sworn that he saw a glimmer of actual respect in the redhead's eyes. “Are you as good with other guns?”

His fellow had never been one to back down from a challenge and soon Bucky and Natasha were deep in a discussion of firing techniques, the two of them working their way from static targets to ones that hardly seemed to pause as they zipped around the room.

Steve would have liked to keep watching Bucky since he’d always found the other man incredibly attractive when he was showing off, but the captain wasn’t allowed to stay on the sidelines for very long. Instead Tony and François ushered him to the west half of the room to test his skills at hand-to-hand. Some mats were set up there for SHIELD's agents to practice sparring and Steve was soon glad of it.

Even though he was far stronger than François, that didn’t matter when the captain couldn’t seem to land a hit. The agent kept reading his moves so that Steve’s fists barely grazed the edge of his shirt and while the blond was holding back a little for fear of hurting his sparring partner, this was just frustrating. Really, really frustrating and eventually the captain thought, _to Hell with it._ He threw his full weight into the next blow, which, of course, was when François used Steve’s own momentum to slam him into the ground.

“Holy crap. Do people actually fight like that?” the blond gasped as he stared up at the ceiling, trying to force the air back into his lungs. “In our day, Hydra soldiers mostly just shot at us with bullets or threw a few punches here and there.”

“Don’t worry, you’ll still get shot at,” Tony replied, grinning down at Steve with far too much amusement for the captain’s taste. “But Hydra’s Strike Teams are also known for their hand-to-hand fighting and you can’t rely on your shield to protect you all the time.”

“Well then, I guess you'd better show me how you did that,” Steve said, accepting François’ offered hand to pull himself back to his feet.

For the next several hours, the agent gave the captain a crash course in a variety of styles, working Steve over until he could barely keep them straight. Even though the other man claimed that he was only showing him the basics, his moves were far fancier than anything Steve had ever seen before. However, the serum had increased muscle memory along with his metabolism and it rarely took more than ten repetitions before he could mimic François perfectly.

Of course, as soon as Steve was feeling comfortable, the agents decided to swap places and Natasha quickly brought him to his knees again. The blond had no idea how she did it since he should have cleaned the floor with her but she had a knack for painful nerve strikes and holds that no amount of strength could break.

But his failure just made Steve more determined and he lost any hesitation about throwing punches at a dame after a few too many kicks right to the face. Although, that might have been the lesson since the first time that he managed to fight Natasha to a standstill, the agent just grinned ferally and ordered him to go again. 

Which he did and even if Steve obviously had a lot to learn, SHIELD couldn’t fault his stamina. When Tony finally called a halt to their session, the blond wasn't even breathing hard.

“All right, Cap. I think that's enough for today. I can't have you breaking anything,” Tony said, waving Natasha down mid-strike. The redhead didn't even stumble at the interruption, smoothly transitioning from her attack into a ready stance.

On the other side of the room, François and Bucky finished up as well, their target shooting having transitioned into a madcap obstacle course. It looked fun if not entirely practical as the two men ducked and wove their way through gym bars, practice dummies, and flying metal discs. Steve had to stop and admire the view for a second as Bucky completed the last leg of the race, the sergeant grinning smugly at François when he came in half an inch ahead.

“Pretty good for an old guy,” the agent laughed, slapping Bucky on the shoulder. “Next time we'll start in on infiltration; I think you could be almost as good as me one day.”

“I may be ninety and crippled but my feet still work,” the other man replied with a roll of his eyes and Steve just had to kiss him then. Because snarky, sarcastic Bucky was the one that he'd grown up with and it was good to see that familiar side of him again.

So the captain threw a sweaty arm across his fellow's shoulders, biting back a chuckle when Bucky wrinkled his nose disgustedly. But his annoyance quickly changed to embarrassment when Steve bent his head and planted a kiss on the other man's lips for everyone to see. It was hardly more than a peck but the sergeant still blushed furiously, hand-holding and Tony's innuendo not preparing him for this. A kiss was different, a kiss was something private, and his cheeks burned brighter when Steve did it one more time.

“I'm going to get you back for this,” Bucky murmured as François started laughing, the agent completely unfazed by the other man's embarrassed glare.

But his revenge would have to wait because SHIELD hadn't finished with its new soldiers yet. After a quick shower, Tony dragged the two men back to the strategy room for another debriefing and Steve was starting to get really tired of hearing about Hydra's overwhelming advantages. Still, the captain could see glimpses of possibility and Tony clearly had the beginnings of a plan.

A difficult, dangerous, and possibly suicidal plan, but with enough time and training, they might be able to pull the mission off. So Steve was feeling cautiously optimistic when the meeting finally broke up at dinnertime. The blond was starving by then and food was a welcome distraction from the mess of information swirling in his head. 

When he reached the dining hall, Steve was surprised to see a score of agents sitting in small clumps of two and three, a few of them waving a greeting at the captain and his sergeant as they chose a table and sat down. Then François and Frederick grabbed plates for Steve and Bucky while Natasha dragged Tony off to deal with some new emergency. 

Although the food was more serviceable than enticing and Coulson asked for yet another autograph, the company proved enjoyable and Steve thought the other men might become good friends in time.

Bucky certainly seemed to be getting along with François, the two soldiers trading stories of their more interesting missions while their fellows continued the conversation on pencil shading from the day before. It was nice to talk about something other than the war or Hydra and Steve found himself wondering if life would be like this more often once the fight was done. Maybe this was what being normal felt like: two couples enjoying a peaceful meal. 

So the captain couldn't be jealous of the way that Bucky was laughing at François' stories, not when the other man kept glancing over at him with such love in his eyes. Instead Steve just wrapped an arm around the sergeant's waist and chuckled along with him when Frederick corrected his partner's wild claims.

Watching the other men interact with each other was still a little strange for Steve. The rhythm of their conversation reminded him of the newly married couple who had lived above his place in Brooklyn. François and Frederick had the same playful air and way of talking through shared glances and while the pair didn't do anything risqué in public, their affection was obvious.

The sight awoke something warm in the captain's chest, wiping away doubts that he hadn't even known were still weighing on his mind. Because as much as he loved Bucky, it was difficult to ignore a lifetime's worth of insults and everyone knew that fairies didn't have real relationships.

Except these men proved that it was possible, that Steve wasn’t totally crazy for wanting everything with Bucky instead of with a dame. He’d thought he was for the longest time. After all, the one night he'd gathered up the courage to go to one of _those_ bars, most of the men there had only seemed interested in having intercourse. 

Honestly, some of them hadn't even bothered to leave the bar before getting busy and the blond had left without finishing his drink. While he was queer enough to find some of those men attractive, he'd been too much in love with Bucky to feel comfortable with the idea of kissing someone else – not that other queers had been any more interested than dames were in a scrawny thing like him. 

However, even though he and Bucky hadn’t really talked about the future, Steve knew that this was it for both of them. This was their forever and for all the terrible things about the current century, he couldn't regret falling when he had gained his deepest wish.

The four men talked for another hour, sitting around the table long after most of the other agents had moved on. But eventually the conversation dwindled and once Frederick started dozing off against his fellow's shoulder, François called it a night.

“I've got to get this layabout to bed before he falls asleep right here,” the agent told Steve and Bucky before pulling his partner to his feet. “The two of you should probably head that way yourselves; Tony wants us training daily until we get you up to snuff and Natasha has never been one to pull her punches.”

“Yeah and I've got the bruises to prove it,” Steve replied with a laugh. “I guess we'd better take your advice.”

The men said goodnight and then headed back to their rooms, Steve getting turned around a few times along the way. SHIELD's concrete walls all looked the same to him and he usually relied on Bucky for directions in unfamiliar terrain. But his fellow was dead on his feet, his missing arm still wearing him down more than the captain liked.

So Steve just steered Bucky away from the walls before he walked straight into them and eventually they managed to reach their goal unscathed. Thankfully the other man woke up a bit when Steve opened the door, rubbing his shoulder as he sat down on the bed.

“You'd think it wouldn't ache so much since it's not really there,” Bucky muttered with a tired sigh before stripping off his shirt and tossing it aside.

Steve wanted to ask if he was all right, but he knew that treating his fellow like an invalid would just make him snap. So the blond simply sat down behind Bucky and ran his hands down the sergeant's back, easing the knots of muscle he found there.

“You seemed to be having a swell time today,” the captain said as Bucky groaned in pleasure, bending his head to give Steve's hands better access. Every time the blond found a particularly sore spot along the sergeant’s spine, his fellow let out a groan that was positively sinful and Steve had almost forgotten that he’d said anything by the time the other man replied.

“You know me; I love a good rifle and it’s nice to know I won’t be completely helpless if we ever get attacked. But they were there for you,” Bucky said, fixing the blond with a self-deprecating smile as he stood up again. “Gotta get Captain America back in fighting shape and all.”

“Yeah right, Natasha didn't seem too impressed with me,” Steve replied, already missing the warmth of his friend’s skin beneath his hands. However, he didn't have to miss it for long because the captain had barely finished his sentence before he had a lap full of Bucky smiling up at him.

“You'll grow on them. You're too stubborn for anything else,” the sergeant said, wrapping his arm around Steve's neck. “You're going to be amazing and I'll be right here with you the whole way.”

The blond fell a little more in love with his fellow every time the other man said a thing like that. But before he could reply with anything too sappy, the sergeant's smile turned decidedly wicked and derailed his thoughts again. 

“Of course, at the moment it's just the two of us and I can think of a few ways to put your skills to better use,” Bucky continued, Steve's breath hitching at the heat in his eyes. He met the other man halfway when he leaned in for a kiss since this was a plan that the blond could get behind wholeheartedly.

\---

Their days fell into a rhythm after that: training in the mornings, strategizing in the afternoons and socializing in the evenings when Frederick and François were available. This wasn't every night since SHIELD was still running missions, but it was nice to have friends again and even Natasha warmed up to Steve eventually. Only a little, but considering where the redhead started, he would take what he could get.

Sure the captain was slightly insulted that Natasha clearly liked Bucky better – she actually relaxed around him sometimes – but he could as long as it took to earn her trust. Besides, the agent's wariness didn’t stop her from being a fantastic teacher and Steve got an actual smile the first time that he managed to take her down.

“I guess you’re not completely hopeless,” Natasha muttered when he let her up again, admittedly a grudging compliment but still the nicest thing that she’d said to him in weeks.

Steve was definitely getting better since he actually managed to hit his sparring partners now and the captain didn’t think SHIELD would wait much longer before launching their last strike. While Banner still hadn’t synthesized a viable version of Erskine’s serum, Tony was starting to get impatient and there were whispers amongst the Resistance that Hydra was planning something big. However, until Captain America was called back into action, Steve planned to enjoy his time with Bucky to the fullest. He wasn't going to waste their second chance. 

Although, the blond almost wished that he was back on the battlefield when he sat down at their usual table one evening and Frederick greeted him with an entirely unexpected train of thought.

“Steve! James here was just telling us about your questions and we’d be happy to offer our advice,” the artist said cheerfully. “The French were the masters of romance after all and let me tell you, François lives up to that. He can do this thing with his tongue… well, let’s just say that I can draw you a diagram if you want to make your guy very, very lucky one of these days.”

“Bucky, what is he talking about?” Steve asked the sergeant, certain that his eyes must be wide and startled in his face. While people in the future were certainly more open about their relationships than he was used to, Frederick had never said anything like that before and somehow the blond was sure that it was all Bucky’s fault.

Indeed, his fellow didn’t seem surprised by the other man’s monologue when Steve glanced over, the sergeant just smirking wickedly as he replied. “I told you I’d get you back, Stevie, and I know you’re curious. Two birds with one stone and all that.”

It took Steve a minute to remember what his fellow was talking about and when he did, he wanted to protest that that was weeks ago. Hell, these days Bucky was the one kissing him in public, but his sergeant had always been the type to serve his vengeance cold. The other man never forgot anything and he was quite happy to take a months-old slight out of someone else’s hide as many bullies had learned to their regret.

So Steve accepted his fate with a sigh. Bucky was right, he was still curious and if he backed out now, the sergeant would just do something worse next time. Besides, even though the other man had never complained about his inexperience, he actually wouldn’t mind a few tips on his technique.

“All right, I’ll leave you boys to it then,” his fellow said, patting Steve on the shoulder as he stood up again. “Our dear captain will be less embarrassed if I’m not around to hear this and Natasha promised to show me the new sniper rifle that she picked up last week.”

Bucky gave Steve a quick kiss before abandoning him to Frederick and François’ expertise and while the captain hadn’t actually expected him to leave, it was probably better this way. If Bucky had been there, Steve would have felt awkward blurting out every stupid question that had ever crossed his mind, and if he was going to do this, he might as well do it properly. Even if it was incredibly embarrassing to discover that Frederick hadn’t been joking about the diagrams and Steve was pretty sure he would never be able to look the other man in the eye again. 

By the time they finished with the lesson – a brief overview of the basics according to François and wasn’t that a terrifying thought – Steve’s head was full to bursting and his cheeks were burning hot enough to scald. But all the embarrassment was worth it the next time that he and Bucky fell into bed together and his lover screamed like that.

In fact, Steve might seriously consider going back for the expert lesson if the war ignored them long enough.


	5. Metal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there is plot.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I was hoping to get this a bit more edited before I posted it, but work has kind of imploded and I don't know when that will be. So here's Chapter 5 as is so you at least don't have to wait anymore.

Captain America was not what Natasha had expected. Sure the man was physically impressive even when laid out in the infirmary, but whatever advantages the serum gave him meant nothing if he couldn’t do what must be done. He needed to be ruthless and from the beginning, the agent had her doubts.

Because the Resistance might have painted Captain America as one of its greatest heroes, but Steve Rogers mostly just seemed nice. Friendly, open, and far too cheerful for someone who had woken up in a completely different century, it took Natasha a week to believe that he wasn’t secretly a Hydra agent meant to sabotage their plans. 

Their enemies had been trying to infiltrate SHIELD for decades and if Pierce had somehow gotten wind of Stark's intentions, he could have easily planted Rogers in the mountains for them to find. Carving up one of his own men to look like Captain America and then placing him in cryo-stasis was more extreme than anything he’d tried before, but expendability was the singular truth of Hydra's law. Natasha remained suspicious of Rogers until she saw him with his sniper because no member of Hydra would have revealed a weakness such as that.

The captain had worn his heart on his sleeve during the reunion with Sergeant Barnes, his relief at the other man's survival too obvious to fake. Even Tony had noticed how much they cared about each other and that was _before_ he caught them kissing. Impressive since the scientist tended to be oblivious to any emotions but his own.

So while Rogers could still be brainwashed, Natasha decided that he was probably safe enough for her leader to visit without supervision and then tried to put all thoughts of Captain America from her mind. She had work to do, work that hadn't stopped just because they'd found a frozen hero in the mountainside.

However, while her colleagues were still professional on missions, Natasha couldn't escape the gossip back at base and nothing that she heard improved her first impression much. The only thing SHIELD’s other agents could talk about was how _nice_ Captain America was; how he listened to their stories and sincerely empathized. While this might serve to humanize the legend in their eyes, humanity wouldn't stop the bullets when their last strike began. Rogers had too much heart to do SHIELD's work – they needed a weapon not a symbol – and the redhead couldn't trust him to burn Hydra to the ground.

Unfortunately, Tony was too starry-eyed to admit the truth about Captain America and so the agent would have to find a way to make his plan succeed. That was her job as Tony's Second – he had the mad ideas and Natasha worked out logistics – and she had survived the Red Room by being adaptable. She would turn Rogers into the weapon that SHIELD required even if she had to beat him black and blue along the way. 

The agent had no intention of allowing someone else to train the captain, not when she knew all the dirty tricks that Hydra’s soldiers liked to pull. SHIELD’s final mission was sure to require her special brand of viciousness and if she was going to train Captain America, then she was going to train his sergeant because James Barnes was the only reason she thought this might succeed.

Natasha had recognized something of herself in the sniper’s eyes. Barnes had the eyes of a survivor, of a man who would do anything to protect the people whom he loved, and his captain was clearly the first person on that list.

In fact, the agent was pretty sure that Rogers was the only person his sergeant cared about, his charming smiles doing little to hide the killer underneath. Someone else might have found this dichotomy disturbing, but Natasha simply declared Barnes a potential asset despite his missing arm. She could work around his injury if he was still as ruthless as his gaze had promised her.

So Natasha asked Tony to bring Barnes to Rogers’ first training session and despite the sergeant’s self-deprecation, he knew what a gun was for. 

Truthfully, his aim was quite impressive once he got used to the difference in his balance and even that didn’t take as much time as the redhead thought it would. Barnes was a natural-born sniper if she’d ever seen one and his skill helped to ease the sting of disappointment when Rogers couldn’t land a punch. His attempts were pitiful and even if he was better with shield in hand, _God I really hope so_ , Captain America couldn’t rely on such a crutch. 

Rogers needed to be a well-rounded fighter if he was going to survive the coming struggle and while Natasha would gladly sacrifice his life to defeat Hydra, she had no intention of sending him to be slaughtered needlessly. The captain deserved a fighting chance against his enemies.

Thankfully, the blond learned quickly and he was able to hold his own in stamina if not experience. Captain America had a long way to go before Natasha would call him ready, but his lack of skill might turn out to be a blessing in the long run; at least she and François wouldn't have to overcome as many bad habits before teaching him their moves.

Both Barnes and Rogers would be terrors in battle once Natasha was finished with them and the agent already had a few ideas about the sergeant’s missing arm. Given his skill with guns, Barnes wouldn’t need a fancy prosthesis to be deadly and Tony should be able to create something workable with the gear they had on hand. Sure her fearless leader was bound to add a few embellishments but those should just make Barnes more effective; the sergeant would be Natasha’s backup in case Rogers’ bleeding heart got the best of him.

So the agent pulled Tony aside once that first training session ended, leaving François and Frederick to get Captain America and his sergeant fed and watered properly. Frederick had always been the best of them at taking care of people so Natasha knew her charges would be in good hands.

She walked Tony to his office before explaining what she needed for Barnes and his eyes lit up instantly. The scientist had always had a weakness for technical challenges and he didn't get to do as much inventing as he would like these days.

When Natasha left the office, Tony was muttering to himself, half a dozen pencil sketches strewn across his desk. It was only a matter of time before he came up with something workable, but even so the redhead didn’t intend to mention this to the sergeant yet. There was no point in giving Barnes hope before his new arm was ready, not when the final battle might arrive too soon.

Instead the agent focused on turning Captain America into a proper fighter and the first time he actually managed to take her down, Natasha had to admit that she was a little proud of him. Not that she showed it beyond a quick flash of smile, giving her student a grudging, “I guess you’re not completely hopeless,” before climbing back to her feet.

She wouldn't allow the captain to become overconfident when his blows still lacked that extra edge of viciousness. Natasha hoped that Captain America would prove more ruthless when fighting enemies instead of allies, but she still had her doubts.

\---

“I know you think Steve's a sap, but he'll do what you need; he hates Hydra more than anything,” Barnes told Natasha a few weeks later while they were watching his captain run SHIELD's combat course again. “Honestly, Steve's never been as nice as most people seem to think.”

At this, the redhead raised an eyebrow because, in her experience, nice was exactly the word that she would use. “Are you sure about that? The man practically bleeds wholesomeness.”

“I never said he _wasn’t_ nice; I said he wasn’t _as_ nice as you think,” Barnes corrected and Natasha was honestly curious what the sergeant thought the distinction was. “If you wanted a monster you should have gone to Hydra but Steve’s always been a dirty fighter and even though he’d prefer not to kill anybody if given other options, he's not a pacifist. We were soldiers after all.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” the agent replied. But the sergeant didn’t take her refusal to believe him personally; he just shrugged his shoulders and went back to watching Rogers as the other man sprinted toward the finish line.

The captain had almost made it when a turret came up in his blind spot and a hail of rubber bullets took him out at the knees.

“If Rogers doesn't learn to watch his back, he's going to get himself killed,” Natasha growled, annoyed that the blond was still making dumb mistakes. While Rogers’ skill had improved in leaps and bounds since they started training, good wasn't good enough for Captain America. He needed to be the kind of hero that the legends always claimed.

“You're not planning to send Steve against Hydra alone, are you?” Barnes asked, whirling on Natasha in alarm. “He may have the serum but he's not invulnerable and I've always been there to back him up.”

To be honest, SHIELD had no intention of sending Captain America into the field without backup even if Banner never managed to create more supermen. But this was the perfect chance to find out if Tony had been making metal arms for nothing; Natasha had been wrong once or twice in her lifetime and the sniper could still decide to sit this battle out.

“Would you watch his back now if you could?” the agent asked, trading her usual methods of interrogation for blunt inquiry. Barnes seemed like he would respond better to frankness than subtle manipulation and his answer proved that her faith hadn't been misplaced.

“I'd follow him in a heartbeat,” the sergeant told Natasha before his lips twisted bitterly. “But being able to run a few obstacle courses doesn’t mean I can hold my own in a real battle; for fuck’s sake, I can barely reload my gun with any speed. So while I’d like to be there, I want Steve to survive more than I care about my pride and it’ll better if he has real agents on his team.”

“Are you sure about that? SHIELD’s men will be more focused on their mission than Rogers’ safety,” Natasha said and perhaps she was having a little too much fun poking at Barnes to see how he’d react.

“Okay, are you _trying_ to burn me up right now?” the man growled, narrowing his eyes in irritation even as the redhead smiled at him placidly. “I _know_ Steve would be safer if I went with him but I can’t and I don’t need you reminding me that I’m fucking useless now.”

“Ah, but that's where you’re wrong, Barnes. Guns aren’t the only things that improved while you were frozen and I asked Stark to make you a new arm as soon as I first saw you shoot.” In fact, Tony had just finished a working prototype, his lab only slightly more singed than it was when he began. While the scientist wouldn’t know if he’d truly succeeded until he tried to attach the new prosthesis, he should have that chance soon enough.

Because Barnes hadn’t been able to hide a brief flash of hope at her announcement and she'd seen the way his fingers twitched whenever Rogers went down hard. The sergeant's admission that he wanted to ride to his captain's rescue was really just confirmation of what the redhead knew already. And, as usual, Natasha was right, even if the sniper tried to put a braver face on it.

“You’d better not be jerking me around,” Barnes warned, as though agent would take such a vague threat seriously. “But if you are being straight with me, then I’m interested.”

With the sergeant’s agreement on record, it was time to schedule the first round of testing. The sooner they got Barnes' new arm attached, the sooner he could learn to fight with it properly.

However, before Natasha could arrange a time with the sergeant, Rogers walked over to join them and Barnes signaled her to silence as his captain neared. Natasha wasn’t sure why the sniper wanted to keep her offer a secret, but she would follow his lead for now.

There wouldn’t be any point in fixing Barnes up with a new arm if his lover wouldn't let him use it and the sergeant had more practice than anyone at wrangling Captain America. Truthfully, the redhead wasn’t worried about Tony’s work being wasted because her money was on Barnes in any argument. All the sniper had to do was look at Rogers with those big brown eyes for his captain to cave completely and he had a vested interest in keeping the other man alive.

So while Natasha would keep an eye on the situation in case she had misread it somehow, she had other things to focus on. Like Rogers’ frankly pathetic showing on the obstacle course and the agent stepped forward to tell her student everything that he’d done wrong. 

If this onslaught of criticism also kept the captain from wondering what she and his sergeant had been discussing, well, Natasha had always been a fan of multitasking whenever possible.

So the agent informed Tony that Project Sniper could move forward once she’d called a halt to that day’s training. However, it was almost a week before she managed to bring Barnes in to test the scientist’s prototype. Natasha wanted to be there so that at least one person would understand Tony’s explanations and the rest of her duties didn’t stop just because she needed to give a man his arm back as soon as possible. Besides, Barnes had kept his secrecy so far and the redhead figured that shaking Rogers off him would probably require careful maneuvering.

The last assumption actually proved false. When Natasha finally carved an hour out of her schedule and told Barnes to meet her at Tony’s lab that evening, the sniper promised that his captain wouldn’t interfere. Indeed, the man arrived outside the door at precisely half-past seven and the agent had to wonder about the laughter on his face.

“I told Steve you were showing me a new rifle so we'll have to stop by the range on our way back; I ain't in the habit of lying to my best guy if I can help it, but we might as well see if this works before I piss him off,” Barnes said. He didn’t offer any explanation for his amusement and Natasha didn’t have the time to ask. 

Instead she just nodded shortly and replied, “Fair enough. I did pick up another rifle on my last mission – a Hydra sniper was blocking my escape and his gun turned out to be quite nice.”

With that, Natasha ushered Barnes into the lab where Tony was waiting for them and then got out of the way. Staying on the sidelines was generally the safest tactic when the scientist was inventing and despite his lack of experience with the explosive nature of the other man’s hobbies, Barnes looked a little wary when Tony turned that manic gaze on him. 

But the agent had already known that Barnes had good survival instincts and she was just getting ready to nudge him forward when he moved on his own.

“So... this is it?” the sergeant asked as he walked over to the table and looked down at the metal arm. Natasha thought the limb was rather beautiful in its own way, all sleek lines and understated deadliness. Tony just needed to sand those last rough edges down.

“Yes, this is it. What do you think, buddy?” Tony asked, although he didn’t stop talking long enough for the other man to answer. “It’s partially made of Vibranium, the same as Cap’s shield, though I didn’t have enough to make it pure. Instead it’s an alloy mixture, keeping it light and strong while reducing some of the crazy physics effects that Vibranium can cause. Seriously, do you have any idea how fascinating your man’s shield is? Normal metal does not bounce like that. But you need to be able to punch someone without getting thrown in some weird direction so I toned it down a bit. Two parts Vibranium, one part my special double-layered plastic polymer and, and of course my nano-…”

Barnes reached over and shoved his hand over Tony’s mouth, cutting off the stream of technobabble in the middle of a word.

“Look, Stark,” he said into the sudden silence. “I don’t need to know all that technical stuff and I won’t understand most of it anyway. Just tell me how to use it, how not to break it, and what’s going to keep it from falling off in the middle of a fight.”

“Fine, fine,” Tony said after the sergeant released him, twitching his coat back into place disgruntledly. “Ruin all my fun, why don’t you? Do you have any idea how long it’s been since I’ve had the chance to make something like this? Fine motor control tied directly into your nervous system, fully-functioning robotic interface; the automated defense algorithms alone are something that Hydra would kill to get their hands on and…”

The scientist paused almost guiltily beneath Barnes’ exasperated glare before starting over one more time. 

“Okay, okay, layman’s terms it is. Once I hook this arm into your nervous system, you’ll be able to use it just by thinking, same as your other one. You won’t feel pain if it gets damaged, though that should be difficult, and it’s only going to be slightly stronger than a normal arm. Otherwise, the rest of your body wouldn’t be able to handle it when you threw a punch and I assume you’re not interested in major surgery to replace whole swaths of bone.

“Your motor control won’t be quite as good as your right arm since there are limits even to my genius. But if we survive long enough, I should be able to get you close someday. For now, I’ve added a few tricks to help compensate for the difference and you should be able to shoot a gun just fine.

“Also, you won’t be able to take this prosthetic off once I attach it properly so you’d better be sure before we proceed. I can do today’s tests without any permanent changes but the final attachment is going to require surgery. This will be as non-invasive as I can make it – that’s what the nanotech is for – but it’s still going to cause some damage so I have a special harness for you to wear for a few weeks afterward. That way your arm won’t fall off before your muscles learn to bear the extra weight.

“So... was that simple enough for you?” Tony asked when he had finished, sarcasm warring with his pride in what he'd made.

Not that Barnes seemed to notice the other man’s snark as he stared down at the metal arm pensively. “I’ll never be able to take it off?”

“Not without more surgery. But you’ll still be able to live normally because we do full service cyborgs here. Vibranium doesn’t rust so there’s no need to worry about water – feel free to have as much shower sex as you want – and you should adapt to the weight pretty fast. Honestly, I haven’t found a downside and once the war is over, I can remove it before you retire to a beach house on the coast. You won’t need two arms to drink lots of alcohol.”

“In that case, do your tests and then I guess I need to talk to Steve,” the sergeant said, sitting down and removing his shirt when Tony asked. 

The sight was actually a little distracting; while Rogers had often stripped down during training, Natasha hadn’t seen Barnes less than fully dressed since he’d woken up and she had to admit the view was fine.

Admittedly, the stump of his left arm wasn’t very pretty, but everyone had scars these days and Barnes’ crooked grin more than made up for the flaw. A grin that grew wider when he caught Natasha staring, the sniper giving her a wink as he settled back in his chair.

It really was a shame that Barnes was unavailable. While the redhead wasn't interested in romance, she could have used some stress relief and even in SHIELD, there weren’t many men who could keep up with her. François came close, but he was as disgustingly in love with Frederick as the sergeant was with Rogers. The last time Natasha had really been interested in someone else was on a mission in Budapest, but it had been several years since the Mad Circus had managed to sneak that agent overseas and she couldn’t seek him out again until the war was done. 

Honestly, Natasha hadn’t been laid properly in ages. So it was no wonder that the agent was distracted when Barnes stretched and his stomach muscled rippled temptingly. But then Tony began checking the sergeant’s reactions and the redhead shortly had a much less pleasant problem on her hands.

Although Natasha wasn't fond of laboratories – incredibly vivid flashbacks just one of the many things that the Red Room had left her with – she had learned to function in them out of necessity. However, Barnes had apparently missed those lessons given the way his knuckles were tightening on the armrest of his chair and Tony was too occupied with his tests to register the danger sign.

Which meant that the agent needed to step in before the scientist triggered a more violent reaction and Natasha snapped her fingers in front of the sergeant's face until he looked at her. 

“Hey, Barnes. Focus,” she ordered and she was relieved that it only took a few seconds for his eyes to clear. “Do you need me to get Rogers? I'm sure he would come running and I can't have you punching Stark before he's done.”

“No, I'm fine,” the sniper replied with a firm shake of his head. A nice bit of bravado considering the way his fingers were still twitching and when Tony picked up a syringe, Barnes gave in and asked, “Would you mind just talking to me so I remember where I am?”

Natasha wasn't exactly a chatty person but she knew how uncertain the sergeant must be feeling to request this much of her. So she wracked her brain for a topic of conversation that would hold his attention and the redhead let out a chuckle when the obvious answer came to mind. “I have a better idea. Why don't you tell me about Rogers instead? I'm sure you have plenty of stories from your younger years.”

This was the correct tactic since Barnes' face positively lit up at her question, his nerves forgotten as he spoke about the past. And despite Natasha's general refusal to learn anything about Captain America's personal life, she couldn’t help being interested in the stories that his sergeant had to tell.

He might have been talking about Captain America, but he wasn’t talking about the Captain America that history had painted as a hero or about the man Natasha thought was much too compassionate. Barnes was talking about Steve Rogers as he had been before the serum: small, scrawny and too stubborn for his own good, his illnesses only matched by his determination to do the right thing anyway. The sergeant's Steve was bitter and self-deprecating, quick to laugh and quick to anger, and fiercely protective of those who couldn’t help themselves.

Listening to Barnes, Natasha slowly came to understand what he’d meant when he'd said that Rogers wasn't as nice as she believed and perhaps she had judged the captain through the lens of her own prejudice. A novice mistake to be sure, but Natasha had never met anyone in whom kindness and ruthless pragmatism were balanced equally.

By the time the sergeant finished, the agent finally understood why he loved Rogers fiercely, just as she now understood why he was so determined to fight at his captain's side. 

Barnes had been protecting his friend from the beginning, shielding Rogers' bleeding heart from the world as best he could until the other man was finally strong enough to change the pain he saw. Or perhaps Natasha had just been spending too much time with both of them if she was starting to read such romance into their relationship and the redhead shook those thoughts from her head with a frown. All that mattered was whether or not Captain America would be able to take down Hydra and if Barnes’ stories proved anything, it was that Rogers was far more effective with his lover at his side.

So Natasha turned to Tony when he finally wrapped up his testing, “Well? What’s the verdict?”

“Hmm?” the scientist replied distractedly, already in the middle of breaking the sniper’s prosthesis down again. “Oh, right. Give me a week to fine tune some things and then we should be good to go. So get out of here already; I’ve got work to do.”

As soon as Barnes heard this, he was up from his chair and halfway out the door, Natasha catching up to him when he paused in the hall. The sergeant was shifting back and forth restlessly, shaking out the last bit of nerves along with his pins and needles, though he stopped when the redhead stood next to him.

“So… that rifle?” he asked after a moment, his frown warning the agent not to ask if he was all right. Not that she cared, really, but she did need Barnes functional in order to trust him at her back.

Which, in this case, meant Natasha needed the sergeant to tell Rogers about Project Sniper so that everything could move forward as she'd planned. Rogers not Captain America because the last few hours had shown her that Barnes didn’t care about the hero, he cared about the man.

Of course, the agent had also learned that she didn’t know the other men as well as she'd thought and while her misjudgment rankled, she was smart enough to admit when she was wrong. Natasha truly had no idea how Rogers would react to Project Sniper, though Barnes’ continued silence implied that he would not be happy, and with both men practically superhuman, the crossfire from an argument might level walls.

However, while Natasha would prefer to stay out of any such lover’s tiff, someone had to inform Rogers about his sergeant’s options. If Barnes refused to step up and explain what SHIELD had offered then the agent would do it herself, keeping a Taser at the ready in case the captain went berserk. 

Not her preferred tactic, but she would do whatever victory required and as the days passed by, Natasha started to think that she might have to bite the bullet after all.

\--

“Have you talked to Rogers yet?” she asked over breakfast Tuesday morning when the sergeant’s week was almost up. The agent had decided to give Barnes a week before doing something drastic and she read the sniper’s answer in his scowl.

“I’m working on it, okay?” Barnes said, his shoulders hunching defensively. “Steve’s just been so happy lately that I don’t want to mess it up.”

“You mean you don’t want Rogers to kick you out of bed when the sex is fantastic,” the redhead retorted, smirking when the sergeant turned to stare at her incredulously. “Oh, come on. You guys trade ‘fuck me’ smiles constantly and I saw the way your dear captain was limping yesterday. You’re lucky you both heal so quickly or we would have had a serious discussion about the effects of sex on training weeks ago.”

“Please don’t tell me you actually thought that you were hiding your relationship,” Natasha continued when Barnes just kept staring at her. “Because, if so, we need to have a talk about what public kissing means.”

“Don’t worry, Romanoff. I’m old, not innocent and I wanted you to know. If I hadn’t staked my claim early, half of SHIELD would be trying to get into Steve’s pants. I’ve just never heard a dame talk about sex like that before,” Barnes replied and it was only after the agent breathed a sigh of relief that she realized how neatly the sniper had derailed her original line of questioning.

“Nice try, sergeant. While you’re going to be a damn fine spy one of these days, you’re not getting off the hook that easily. If you don’t talk to Steve about your arm today, I’ll tell him myself and we both know how badly that could go.”

Given the way he winced, Barnes knew exactly what she meant and the sniper held up his hand in surrender before she could elaborate.

“Okay, okay. There’s no need for drastic measures. I’ll talk to Steve right after breakfast if we can skip this morning’s training for the cause?” He said the last with his best winning smile, eternally hopeful that his charms might work on her this time.

Not that they did, of course, but Rogers had improved enough that a short break wouldn’t kill him and she needed Project Sniper sorted out as soon as possible. So Natasha just shrugged and said, “If you must. Use the storage tunnels off the kitchen and no one should bother you.”

Barnes nodded once before squaring his shoulders and walking over to Rogers. The blond was talking to Frederick – their discussion surprisingly heated considering the artsy subject matter – but he paused mid-sentence when his lover came up behind him, turning to look at Barnes before the sergeant could tap his arm. 

Both men did that unconsciously, gravitating toward each other like they were magnetized, and that was probably a major reason the Howling Commandos had been so effective in the field. Honestly, Barnes and Rogers' sense of each other was borderline telepathic and Natasha hoped to tap this skill for SHIELD's last strike.

The agent trailed after Barnes as he led his captain toward the tunnels that she'd recommended, slipping into the secondary access corridor when no one was watching her. While talking in the storage tunnels would protect the two men from interruption, it would also allow Natasha to eavesdrop in comfort and this was one conversation that she wanted to hear.

Part curiosity and part pragmatism, Natasha couldn’t deny a hint of anticipation when she settled against the wall of the corridor and Barnes’ voice rang out clear.

“Steve, there’s something I’ve got to talk to you about. And I don’t think it’s going to make you very happy so just hear me out before you say anything,” the sergeant said. He sounded nervous and much less suave than usual, though perhaps that was understandable.

“All right, Buck. I can do that.”

There was a pause then, mostly likely Barnes trying to get his thoughts together and when he finally started talking, the words came out in one long rush.

“You know my arm is the only thing keeping me from fighting Hydra with you and Stark has been working on a replacement – like the ones the army used to give people, only much fancier. He says I should be able to control it just like my real one when he’s done, but I needed to talk to you first because there’s no point in doing this if you won’t let me watch your back.”

“Bucky, I… I don’t… You knew I wouldn’t like it but you did it anyway?”

“It was Romanoff’s idea; I didn’t even know this kind of thing was possible. But if I had, I would have talked to Stark myself. I can’t… I can’t let you go out there without me; I thought I could but not if there’s another way. So I need you not to be mad at me, please. Say it’s okay?”

“I don’t know if I can, Buck. I’m not angry; I just – why didn’t you tell me that this was still eating you?” the captain asked.

“What was the point? You couldn’t do anything about it and I figured you had enough crap on your plate without having to listen to my whining. And then when Romanoff mentioned the possibility, I didn’t know whether it would actually pan out. There wasn’t any point in having this fight again if I was just gonna be forced to watch you leave me anyway.”

“I’m not- _Bucky_ ,” Rogers said, sounding completely wrecked.

“See, this is why I didn’t want to tell you. You get that look on your face, like I’m breaking your heart, and I refuse to feel guilty about protecting you.”

“You shouldn’t feel guilty; I don’t _want_ you to feel guilty, but you have to let me protect you too. Even if you can take care of yourself, that doesn’t stop me from worrying and I can’t help wishing that you were safe and sound. I don’t want you to get hurt again, Bucky. I love you and you mean the world to me.”

“I love you too and that’s why you have to let me do this,” Barnes told the captain gently. “If you go out there without me and you die, I’ll never forgive myself. We both know that SHIELD cares more about defeating Hydra than getting you back home and you are not expendable. Not to me.”

There was a long silence then, long enough that Natasha started to wonder if they’d left. But apparently Rogers was just mulling over his lover’s arguments. After another minute, the captain let out a sigh and said, “Okay, Buck. I’m behind you. Just remember that you’re not expendable either. I don’t what I’ll do if something goes wrong and you don’t make it back.”

“That’s easy, Steve; you’ll grieve, you’ll rage, and then you’ll burn the bastards to the ground. That’s what I’m gonna do if you dare to die on me. But at least this way we’ll both have better odds of coming back. Stark has been trying to sell me on a house by the ocean once the war is over and I think what's left of Brooklyn actually sounds rather nice.”

With that, the pair started talking about lighter matters but Natasha had heard enough to know that she could move forward with her plans. Barnes would be getting his arm and SHIELD would be getting the fighter that it needed, someone who would do anything to see Hydra turned to ash.

\---

“All right, Sergeant; are you ready for your first real mission? Make sure to bring your arm back in one piece.”

“Just the arm, Stark?” Barnes replied with a smirk as he finished strapping on his gear, the metal of his arm gleaming beneath the lights before he covered it. “I should have known you only loved me for my robot body parts.”

“Sorry, buddy. The rest of you belongs to the Capsicle over there. Besides, I prefer my partners a bit more curvaceous if you know what I mean,” Tony retorted with a wave toward Rogers, who was hovering over his sergeant worriedly. He hadn’t been happy when Natasha had said that she wanted to take Barnes out on his own, but he had seen reason eventually. 

While the sniper had recovered nicely from his surgery, he could only learn so much under controlled conditions and SHIELD needed to know how his arm would perform out in the field. 

So the agent had picked a relatively easy mission. She and Barnes would infiltrate one of Hydra’s minor production facilities and discover whether there was any truth to the rumors of lethal new tech being developed by their enemies. SHIELD didn’t need any surprises when it began its final strike and the tentative launch date was only a few weeks away. War Machine, the Mad Circus, Rocinha, and all the other rebel groups needed time to solidify their positions without tipping off their enemy and this was a strike that must be unified. This strike needed to win the war once and for all because the Resistance simply didn’t have the resources to continue this stalemate for another century. 

Yet Natasha was more certain that they _would_ win than she had been in a long time and she owed much of her hope to the three men standing with her now.

“Speaking of Captain America, you need a codename,” Tony said, making a few last minute adjustments to Barnes’ left hand before closing up the access port. “All of SHIELD's active agents have a codename and we’ve finally made you one of us.”

“Isn't that a bit old-fashioned?” Rogers asked with a grin, clearly remembering the ribbing he had received about his former costume. SHIELD’s agents tended more towards the practical than the symbolic and none of them would have been caught dead with such a large target on their chest.

However, codenames were practical when fighting a rebellion and Tony wouldn’t be swayed from the subject now. “Don’t be silly, Rogers; you old guys had a few good ideas here and there. We can leave you as Captain Fantastic America or whatever since your legend is part of your advantage, but your buddy here needs something too. Something that will strike fear into the hearts of our enemies.”

“Just call me the Soldier, that’s what I am,” Barnes said with a shrug and if Tony hadn’t shot down this suggestion, Natasha would have done it herself.

“We said fear, Barnes, not boredom. You need Hydra agents to whisper your name when something moves in the shadows and waste their bullets flinching at the wind. Men don’t call me the Black Widow because they want to marry me,” the redhead explained, her smile somewhat terrifying given the look on Rogers face. “I admit that some of SHIELD’s codenames are slightly pathetic, but if you’re going to work with me then you need a proper epithet. Although, Soldier isn’t a bad start if you add some character.”

“We could call you the Bloody Soldier,” Tony offered with a smirk as the four of them left the armory.

“No, that sounds like I’m dying,” the sergeant retorted. “Or a really angry Brit.”

“The Robot Soldier,” was the scientist’s next suggestion, to which Barnes raised one eyebrow incredulously.

“I’m not your sidekick, Stark. If I’m anyone’s sidekick then it’s Steve or Natasha and they both have better names than that.”

“The Ancient Soldier.”

“See, now I know you’re just messing with me,” Barnes said, before lunging forward to ruffle Tony’s hair The scientist gave an undignified squeak before running to hide behind Rogers so that the sniper couldn’t get at him again. 

“How about the Winter Soldier?” Rogers offered when the other men had finished squabbling like children, his companions turning to look at him in surprise. 

“Bucky deserves a good codename if it will keep him safer,” the captain said into the silence, his shoulders hunching defensively beneath Natasha’s stare. “And he’s the only reason that I used to survive the winters half the time.”

“You… just… You are the most…”

Rogers being ridiculously sweet again was enough to ruin his lover’s self-control, Barnes slamming him back against the wall and kissing him thoroughly. But even if the captain’s explanation wasn’t exactly frightening, Natasha thought he’d hit on something appropriate. Every Russian knew that winter wasn’t something you defeated, it was something you endured, and you never knew when it might decide to claim your life.

So when the two men finally came up for air, Natasha interjected pointedly: “Winter Soldier it is. Now, can we please get on with it?”

“Sorry, Romanoff,” Barnes replied sheepishly, though he didn't actually move away from his captain until Rogers nudged him the side.

“Go on, Buck. The sooner you find out all of Hydra's secrets the sooner you come back,” the blond said with another sweet smile.

“All right, let's go be super spies,” the sergeant sighed, giving Rogers one last kiss and then following Natasha to their car.

Barnes probably would have been even less enthusiastic if he’d known just how long the trip would take. There was a reason Natasha knew far too many travel games and the sergeant was about to get the crash course because the base they were investigating was located in what had been Liechtenstein, just outside the Hydra stronghold of Vaduz. All of Europe's small republics had become centers of Hydra influence, the group's generals using the wealth of these countries to build grand outposts full of forbidden luxuries.

They didn't care about the remoteness of these bases or their harsh surroundings. They didn't have to when most generals flew everywhere. But SHIELD Grenoble was trying to stay beneath Hydra's radar as much as possible and so there would be no stolen helicopters this time around.

Instead Barnes and Natasha slid into one of SHIELD's special vehicles, designed to look as junky as every other civilian car but far stronger underneath. Unfortunately, the added metal plating and various hidden weapons didn't make the drive any faster, five hours stretching into six as the agents were forced to detour around blockades and the random checks that Hydra liked to make. 

While there was a fake travel permit in the glove box of the car, the redhead preferred to rely on that only for emergencies. Frederick's work was good, but Hydra tended to change the permit design at erratic intervals in order to squeeze new fees out of its citizens. To be caught with an outdated permit, or worse with none at all, was to invite any punishment that Hydra's soldiers chose to deliver and they were known for being inventive in their cruelty.

Just one more way that Pierce kept his iron hand around the throat of Europe's people and Natasha knew it was the same on other continents. Hydra was a sickness, a cancer within the heart of the world, and no one would be safe until it was burnt out. How could they be safe when places such as the Red Room flourished in dark corners and secret hideaways?

So Natasha drove and Barnes proved himself a decent traveling companion, not given overly to talking but competitive enough to hold his own when the agent became bored. She won, of course, but the sergeant put up a good fight before losing gracefully.

Once the redhead had soundly trounced Barnes a few times, she turned the conversation back to their mission. The agents wouldn’t attempt to talk their way into the Vaduz base, although some of Natasha's most successful interrogations had been conducted with a red dress and a glass of wine. But this was meant to be the sergeant's initiation as well as a fact-finding mission and his pretty smile wasn't the sort that most Hydra agents liked.

This mission would be an infiltration, silence and stealth their weapons as much as violence, and Natasha pulled the car down a side path once they neared Vaduz. She hid the vehicle in a cluster of thick pine trees before tossing one of Frederick's canvases over the top of it, a few more scattered branches and tattered leaves finishing the job.

Then she sheathed her last few daggers and strapped on her mask, the Black Widow born where Natasha Romanoff had stood. Next to her Barnes did the same before stripping the covering off his arm to reveal the gleaming metal underneath.

What the Winter Soldier lost in stealth, he would gain in intimidation and the enhancements to his arm worked better when not covered up. So the two agents made their way toward the base, slipping through the underbrush in order to avoid Hydra's guards. There were more of them than should have been assigned to such a small outpost, evidence that something important might truly be hidden here.

A few of Tony's special darts and the Black Widow's garrote took care of those guards that couldn't be avoided and soon the two of them had slipped over the walls. This base was laid out much the same as every other that Natasha had infiltrated, barring the unusual increase in security. 

Elite guards and dogs patrolling while the latest technology blocked every door and window, including some alarms that even Stark's scrambler had trouble with. However, the Winter Soldier's arm truly was a thing of beauty and soon the two agents were standing inside one of Hydra’s warehouses. An empty warehouse but the Black Widow could see remnants of an arsenal, scraps of metal and wiring scattered around the room.

“Hydra was building something. We need to find out what,” Barnes whispered over her shoulder, the other agent watching the exits while she gathered a few samples to take back to SHIELD. 

But they needed more than samples so Natasha nodded the Winter Soldier toward the inner door, allowing him to take point this time. Might as well let him practice his hand-to-hand and indeed the sergeant dropped the first guard with brutal efficiency. Barnes knocked the man's gun aside and wrapped his left arm around his target's throat in one smooth motion, no time for him to cry out before a quick jerk broke his neck.

The two agents hid the body and moved on deeper into the complex, leaving a trail of corpses in their wake. While the Black Widow sometimes tried to show mercy to the lowest ranks of Hydra's soldiers, she had no pity for the elites who had gained their positions by spilling her comrades' blood. Promotions within Hydra were granted solely off a soldier's kill count and the elite strike forces required at least a hundred confirmed bodies to consider anyone. A hundred just to start and while Natasha's tally was far higher, she was wiping those names off one by one.

Two wrongs might not make a right but destroying Hydra would a long way toward balancing out the red marks in her ledger, the agent clawing her way back to humanity one life at a time. Perhaps this was an odd way to think about it, but the Black Widow could not change her nature; she was a weapon and the best that she could hope for was to know that she was killing people who deserved to die.

The Winter Soldier was just as ruthless – just as vicious as she'd expected – and his smile grew a little more feral with every blow he struck. He carried an endless well of anger there and whatever else that might say about him, Natasha knew that she had chosen right.

Barnes kicked one last soldier straight through the door that he was guarding before silencing his groaning and the Black Widow followed him into the room. Half office and half lab, this chamber reminded the agent of Tony's personal quarters and whatever secrets this base was hiding, Natasha would bet the truth was here.

So the Winter Soldier started searching the papers scattered across the desk while she booted up the computer, eyes cataloging signs of a hasty exit all around the room. Whatever Hydra had been doing, they had finished it in a hurry and when the computer finished loading, the agent's blood went cold.

“Widow? Are you making any sense of this?” the Winter Soldier asked over her shoulder as she skimmed through the files and the Black Widow wished that she could tell him no. But the agent did understand it; she understood it far too well. 

“They've been chipping us; chipping everyone through the drinking water,” the Black Widow whispered in shock as she fumbled SHIELD's drive into the computer to copy as much data as she could. “Tracking our movements through nano-chips in our bloodstreams to discover who is loyal to their cause.”

“Hydra can do that? Why haven’t they wiped out the Resistance years ago?” Barnes asked. This was the fundamental question and it took some more digging for the agent to find the answer that she sought.

Hydra might have been tracking the world's population for years, but even its computers couldn’t analyze the habits of millions easily. It had needed something more – a way to differentiate its enemies from the masses and a way to kill them instantly. That's what this base had been building, what this base had been meant to study, and when she saw the name assigned to the project, the agent recoiled back a step.

“We need to go right now,” the Black Widow said sharply, yanking her drive out of the computer and turning toward the door. She needed to inform SHIELD of Hydra's plan so that Tony could find a way to stop it from succeeding but their exit was already compromised.

Because the agents had barely taken a step before a voice rang out, words echoing from the cold concrete walls.

“Sergeant Barnes and my dear Natalia; this is my lucky day. Two of my favorite test subjects here at once.”

The voice was familiar, far too familiar, and the agent felt the Winter Soldier go stiff at her back. But she could not concern herself with him right now because that voice was the soundtrack of the Black Widow’s childhood, of the years that she had tried so hard to put behind her, and in this instant, it all came rushing back. The lessons, the tests, the endless training and unsympathetic hands. The Red Room was all that she had ever known, all that she had needed, and she had killed more people before her sixteenth birthday than most did throughout their lives.

Natalia had been born in blood. She had drunk it and dreamed of it, until one day she woke up drowning and knew she had to stop. There had been no moment of epiphany, no sudden revelation that Hydra was evil, just a deep abiding hate for the image in her mirror.

She had hated herself and the Red Room and her handlers and no one had been worse than the man who ran it all. The man who smiled at her as though she was no more than a tool of his making, one that must be punished for disobedience and honed when it grew dull. The man who was talking now, even though he should have died more than ten years ago. 

But what stepped through the door was not Arnim Zola, at least not as he used to be. This was a robot or perhaps some sort of cyborg, huge and lumbering even as Zola’s face peered out from its chest. Zola’s because there was no mistaking the cruelty in his eyes.

“Truly, Barnes, it is delightful to see you again. I assumed you were long dead, but perhaps my experiments were more successful than I initially believed. You were the only subject to survive, you know, even if you did not share either Captain America or the Red Skull's drastic shift in DNA,” the screen with Zola's face said proudly, ignoring the Winter Soldier's snarl of disgust. “Indeed my experiments with you and your fellow prisoners paved the way toward the creation of such beauties as my dear Natalia here.”

“That is no longer my name,” the Black Widow growled. Zola was always far too good at getting beneath her skin.

“Of course it is, my dear. You chose to throw your talents away on the Resistance, but I am giving you one last chance to change your mind. Come back to me, the both of you, and you may yet survive. I will give you any luxury that you might desire, upgrade that pathetic arm of yours, and keep you safe when Lucifer’s hammer falls upon the world. Otherwise, you must die because this is an important moment for Hydra, the triumph of science over physical brutality, and I’m afraid that I cannot let you ruin it.”

The Winter Soldier reacted to this threat by pulling the rifle off his back and aiming it at Zola, his eyes burning with enough fury for the both of them. Yet as much as she hated the scientist, Natasha had more questions and her firm grip on the sniper’s arm kept him from firing.

“We will stop you,” she said, putting as much conviction as she could into the words. “Your preparations have yet to be finished and SHIELD has plans of its own. We will stop this madness before you destroy everything.”

“I'm afraid the information on that computer is rather outdated, Natalia,” Zola corrected almost gently. “We have shipped our drones to the far corners of the earth; their guns ready and waiting for my algorithm to tell them where to strike. It has already been uploaded into the system, you see, and in seventy-two hours your foolish resistance will be nothing more than bloody smears upon the ground.”

The scientist smiled at his former test subjects condescendingly as an alarm began to ring out through the base. So the Winter Soldier shot him, only a moment before the Black Widow would have done the same. 

The two agents shared one panicked look before dashing toward the door, leaving their past behind in a crumpled mass of gears and sparking wires on the floor. If Zola had spoken truth then the Resistance was running on borrowed time already and Natasha could almost hear the clock ticking down. So she didn't bother with subtlety any longer, relying on surprise and ruthlessness to get them out of here.

With the alarms already sounding, there was no need to keep their weapons holstered and Hydra's soldiers dropped like flies. The Black Widow's knives took almost as many as the Winter Soldier's bullets, every strike precisely placed to be killing blow.

The infiltration that had taken them the better part of an hour was reversed in twenty minutes, the two agents bursting through the main doors and then sprinting toward their vehicle. Natasha red-lined their engine on the entire trip back, no longer worried about drawing Hydra's eye. While she did avoid the larger blockades, the one squad that tried to pull them over regretted that impulse dearly and they made it back to Grenoble in record time.

The agent only slowed down once they neared the city, unwilling to lead Hydra to SHIELD's main base even now. 

“We're coming in hot, Iron Man, and the news isn't good. You need to call everyone back in right now,” Natasha warned as soon as she was in range to call the base, one of SHIELD's informants meeting them at the edge of the city to ensure the path was clear.

She and Barnes must have been a sight when they walked into the conference room, both armed to the teeth and decked out in full gear. All that black leather hadn’t been the most comforting thing to wear while driving, but it had its uses and the sudden silence that greeted the agents’ entrance saved Natasha the trouble of shouting to be heard.

The redhead went over to the projector and plugged in the drive with their stolen data while Barnes walked over to Rogers and laid a hand on his arm. The sergeant just shook his head when the captain raised an eyebrow, turning his attention back to Natasha as the first of Hydra's files appeared upon the screen.

“What the hell?” Tony exclaimed, making sense of the images much faster than anyone else in the room. He ran to the agent's side and began pulling up more files, muttering furiously to himself as he took them in. “How did they- the water? Those fucking bastards... probably could detect it... I wonder if the Hulk or the icicles have them too – a foreign intrusion in the blood should have been destroyed. Otherwise, Banner would have noticed it. But maybe I can...”

While the scientist was busy having an epiphany, Natasha explained what they had found to the rest of the room, SHIELD's other agents reacting with the expected horror. They all knew what this meant; it meant the end of everything and there was no hope in her colleagues’ eyes. Because the Resistance wasn't ready and there seemed to be nothing left to do but die.

Yet even if the task was hopeless, the mood of the entire room shifted when Captain America stood up, “So attack now. You've been telling me about Mission Reaper for weeks; move the timeline up. If we can infiltrate Pierce's stronghold before the drones are activated, then we may still have a chance.”

“But we're not ready,” Tony protested, snapped out of his scientific trance by Rogers' words. “I can probably counteract their chips eventually, but not in a couple days, there's just no way. And the drones? Those are a whole 'nother deal. Fuck, just telling everyone about this will take hours by itself.”

“We don’t have a choice, Tony. We go now or we die,” Natasha said and eventually her leader sighed heavily.

“I guess we do. All right then... François – see if you can contact the other Resistance groups. Use the uplink in my office and have Jarvis help you out. Focus on the main ones for now; if we can get through to War Machine, the White Lotus, Rocinha and the other hubs then they should be able to contact the smaller groups in their areas. Natasha – you know our plan of attack; get everyone prepped and see if your informants can get in touch with Fury at Pierce's headquarters. We’ll need him and the others to get us inside when the moment comes. Banner – you're with me. I'm going to see what I can do to counteract Zola's algorithm and sabotage those fucking drones.”

The meeting broke up as SHIELD's agents ran off to do as their leader ordered and Natasha knew that no one would be sleeping much over the next three days. While the Resistance had been planning this mission for months, moving up the timeline would be nearly impossible, particularly when communication between rebel groups was unreliable at best.

But SHIELD was out of time; Natasha was out of time and she could only hope that Captain America and the Winter Soldier would be enough to see them through.


	6. Blood

The day dawned clear and cold, nothing in the brilliant sunshine or bright blue sky to warn of the blood that would be spilled. But Hydra was finally ready to wipe out the last of its enemies and once Zola's drones were activated, those who had dared to challenge Pierce would be ash upon the wind.

This cleansing would begin in Europe at dawn, moving west with the sun until anyone who wasn't loyal to Hydra had been slain. There would be no more Resistance, no more secret agents to free Pierce's prisoners and leave bases burning in their wake. There would only be Pierce – king, ruler, despot – the kind of leader that the Red Skull had only dreamed of being and he would build his perfect world on a pile of scorched bones. 

So the High Commander summoned his most senior generals to witness his great triumph, every member of Hydra called back home again. They left behind their amusements and their cruelties to fill a thousand mountain strongholds even as the citizens of the world were gathered to watch the slaughter soon to come.

Hydra didn't believe in winning without an audience and it had equipped every home and business with a special viewing screen. Hydra's commanders could tap into these screens at any moment, allowing Pierce to speak directly to his people and his generals to flaunt each new atrocity. 

However, this was the first time in memory that the world's entire population had been summoned simultaneously; whether morning, noon, or dead of night, every citizen was ordered to the screens to watch as Hydra's drones were launched.

With such a victory at hand, there was no thought of defense in Pierce's stronghold when dawn touched the sky. Even Zola's silence failed to cause alarm because the man had done his duty and he had been scheduled to receive his final punishment. The scientist could not be suffered to live when there was a chance that he might alter what he had created and Pierce would not allow anyone else to hold such power in their hands. It was his and his alone and his smile was blinding in its condescension as the worldwide broadcast began.

“Citizens of the Empire,” he said and then paused dramatically, his grey eyes cold and piercing through the screen. “Citizens of the Empire, your salvation is at hand. From this moment forward, there will be no need to question the loyalty of anyone around you because Hydra will know the true hearts of all its citizens. I will know your deepest thoughts and darkest desires, and those who defy me will be punished for their wicked treachery.”

Pierce paused again so that his listeners could understand the true import of his words. However, before the High Commander could continue, an explosion rocked the stone beneath his feet. Screams and shouts echoed through the cameras as people watched transfixed; SHIELD had infiltrated Hydra's greatest stronghold, surprise allowing the rebels to overwhelm their enemies.

All across the globe, the Resistance threw everything at Hydra: arrows, bullets, knives and even homemade weapons, vengeance driving them to vicious savagery. However, even as SHIELD swarmed the battlements of the Red Skull’s former castle and the White Lotus moved like smoke through Hydra’s major Asian bases, not all of their allies were as successful in their fights. Some members of the Resistance hadn’t been able to attack on such short notice, their strikes either nonexistent or woefully unprepared. 

Rocinha's squads in Rio were betrayed by one of their own informants, half their number cut down by an ambush before they reached the local Hydra base. But the rebels didn't give up even as they retreated, Hydra's forces bogging down within the twisting streets and secret corridors of the city's slums. So while there was loss that day, the death of each guerrilla did not come easy and Hydra wouldn't soon recover from the slaughter that it faced.

The Mad Circus made it farther, Hawkeye and his agents reaching the upper levels of Chicago's fortress before one of Pierce's elite strike squads pinned them down. Rumlow and his men weren't supposed to be there; they were supposed to be in the bastion at Cape Town and while this eased the path of Bloemfontein to victory, the Mad Circus was soon caught without escape. 

Hawkeye and Trickshot managed to hold off Rumlow's soldiers but the brothers couldn't break through the line to freedom, not without abandoning their wounded comrades and that they would not do. Instead the pair would fight as long as they were able and they swore to face their end with courage when it came. They would die with honor and be glad of it, though Hawkeye felt a twinge of regret at the thought of the red-haired assassin he would have liked to see again.

Hundreds of miles away, a different redhead was having a far more successful mission; War Machine had earned its name at last. The group’s leaders hadn't allowed the lack of time to daunt them when they’d been planning this strike for a decade, their agents armed with cleverness and lethal technology.

War Machine rolled over the Hydra base in the remnants of the White House without flinching and it was Pepper Potts who claimed the eastern general's head. The rebels took control of the stronghold's weapons and communications, and they aimed this arsenal at their remaining enemies. But for all the damage that War Machine inflicted, the group’s aid was stretched too thin.

Still, even as the agents of the Resistance fought and died with the knowledge that their homelands were still conquered, these attacks served their purpose well. For while the drones were stationed in every Hydra outpost, they could only be activated by a single person in the world. Pierce's refusal to share power was his greatest strength and his greatest weakness now because the Resistance didn't have to defeat every member of Hydra in order to stop this massacre, it only had to bring one fortress down.

SHIELD had to destroy Pierce before he could call upon his army; destroy Zola's equation so that it could never see the light of day. That goal was worth its comrades' sacrifice and each battle entered was one more base that could not come to the High Commander's rescue. 

So while this might not be the victory that the Resistance had long dreamed of, it would not be defeat. It would not be the end as long as dissenters could still grow within Hydra's grand regime and their foe would carry the scars of this assault for years. 

But first, SHIELD had to stop Pierce and the fighting was just as fierce in Europe as it was on other continents. 

The Red Skull's fortress had been upgraded since Peggy Carter killed him, Hydra's new leaders having no intention of dying like the last. Pierce had protections in place to guard against assassins and so there could be no quiet infiltration now.

This was an assault, plain and simple. But SHIELD could still tip the balance in its favor and here the organization's double agents proved invaluable. Some of them had spent a lifetime advancing through Hydra’s ranks for this one moment, selling their souls and their morality so that they could bring the tyrants down. Agents Hill, Thirteen, and a score of others had never doubted the importance of their mission, and indeed, those who had lived out Hydra’s evil were the most fanatic for SHIELD’s cause.

It was Hill who had smuggled out the blueprints to Pierce's fortress piece by piece and it was Thirteen who helped SHIELD’s agents through the outer wall. The outer wall alone since neither Hill nor Thirteen had clearance for the inner chambers yet.

However, even if the inner chambers could not be breached in secret, Pierce’s stronghold had other weaknesses and Hill’s work meant that SHIELD knew exactly where to strike. Its agents knew exactly where to place their bombs in order to cause the greatest damage and it was the first of these explosions that interrupted Pierce’s monologue. Soon the entire fortress was mired in smoke and chaos, Hydra’s soldiers ambushed as they ran to put the fires out.

The chaos only grew when SHIELD’s planted agents turned against their comrades, people who had fought together for years suddenly proving false instead. Hydra was under attack on two fronts and one of the attacks was led by someone out of ancient history.

Hydra remembered Captain America long after most of the world had forgotten; Hydra remembered his death as one of its greatest triumphs and he should not be walking free. Captain America should not have been alive, let alone leading an assault upon the Empire’s greatest stronghold. But he was. A legend was attacking Pierce's castle and many of Hydra's soldiers were too busy gaping to dodge as the captain's shield bounced off the walls.

Yet it was the shadows at Captain America's back who scythed through SHIELD’s enemies and those agents who survived would never forget what they had seen. They would remember the Winter Soldier and the Black Widow as death incarnate, the mountain of corpses in their wake matched only by their cold brutality.

The captain's squad had almost reached the upper levels of the fortress before they finally encountered Hydra's elite soldiers. These men and women were different from their comrades; they'd carved their way to the top of Hydra's ranks through skill and violence and the sight of Captain America didn't throw them off for very long. 

If anything, his presence just made his enemies fight harder. Here was a trophy that no one else had ever captured, a symbol of the Resistance as he lived and breathed, and Pierce would be sure to reward his killer accordingly.

Soon SHIELD's main squad was pinned down just before the inner sanctum and Captain America was slowly split off from the rest. The Winter Soldier saw this and tried to reach his captain, his arm sparking dangerously as he fought through his enemies. But the man was still a few feet away when a thick sheet of metal slammed down across the hall.

This was the fortress' secondary defense system, activated by Pierce once he realized that the attack was going poorly for his side. Thick metal blast doors sealed off every access to his central chamber and perhaps that would have been the end of it if he hadn't also sealed several of his enemies inside. 

Hydra's supreme leader couldn't have known that one of SHIELD's best agents was standing at his shoulder, had been standing there since before his broadcast started, and even those whose way was blocked would not give up easily. The Winter Soldier nearly shorted out his arm trying to break through the metal that kept him from his captain, only subsiding when the Black Widow laid a hand upon his arm.

“We'll find another way,” she promised. Ghost, Chameleon, and the others nodded grimly at her back. Their options might be limited but Captain America was their friend as well as leader and they would not let him down.

The Hulk could have broken through the blast doors, but a network of gamma radiation had stopped him at the gate. After all, the Hulk had been born in one of Hydra's laboratories and its scientists had grown quite skilled at containment through the years. 

However, while Banner couldn't aid the agents inside the fortress, Pierce would receive no reinforcements as long as the Hulk guarded the perimeter. He handled all the ground forces while Iron Man cleared out the skies. This left SHIELD's other agents free to concentrate on finding a way back to their captain, the man fighting for his life beyond those metal barriers. 

Steve was outnumbered and outgunned by Hydra's soldiers and his enemies had the added advantage of knowing the stone beneath their feet. This was their ground, their territory, and the captain was slowly driven further from his allies as he fought.

However, Steve had heard the Winter Soldier banging on the metal shutters and if his sergeant's arm couldn't break that barrier, he didn't have a prayer. His shield might have done some damage, but the captain could hardly make the attempt with a score of soldiers at his throat and so his only option was to press on instead.

Thus, while Hydra was herding Captain America, he was also leading them deeper into the fortress with a single goal in mind. As much as Steve wanted to reunite with his squad, he needed to reach Pierce before the other man could finish what he'd started and indeed, time was running out.

Pierce was no fool and after activating his secondary defense system, he turned back to the console that continued to broadcast his face across the world. In fact, even those citizens who had been dozing off at the beginning of his message – many of them used to Hydra's needless announcements and claims of victory by now – were staring riveted at the screens before their eyes.

No one had ever seen fear on the face of Hydra's leader, but there had been a flicker of it when the first shots rang out. The world had seen fear and alarm and for a moment, Pierce had forgotten that he had an audience. 

He would never have allowed himself to curse so violently if he'd remembered, the facade of benevolent leadership twisting into something monstrous instead. This was the true face of Hydra’s High Commander: arrogant, vicious, and completely without mercy, and even those who believed in Hydra’s message had to fight back a shudder at the mad light in his eyes.

However, Pierce hadn't allowed his mask to slip for long. He had forced a calm smile back onto his face as he ordered High General Müller to trigger the defense system that would shut out their enemies. Truthfully, the High Commander didn't wear the mask to fool his people; he was quite certain that he could convince those sheep of anything. Pierce wore the mask to protect himself from Hydra's best and brightest, the generals who were gathered in the inner chamber now. Because the High Commander knew that none of them would hesitate to take advantage of his weaknesses.

There was only one man Pierce trusted never to betray him. One man who had more than proved his loyalty. Nicholas Fury had saved Pierce's son without a thought to his own safety or advancement and thus he was the only person Pierce trusted at his back.

Of course, even Hydra's High Commander could be mistaken and SHIELD's longest serving double agent was simply waiting for the perfect moment to attack. He didn't want to break his cover until he knew how to activate Zola’s drones, not when the rest of Pierce's subordinates were standing ready to attack.

Fury wasn’t as young as he used to be and he had been counting on SHIELD's onslaught to draw more of his enemies away. Of course, the first thing any good agent had to learn was how to adapt when a plan went FUBAR and this one was fast unraveling. As far as Fury knew, Captain America and his comrades were trapped on the wrong side of Hydra's defenses and they would beat their hands bloody before they made it through those walls. 

Indeed, the agent decided that he couldn't wait for the rest of SHIELD to join him when Pierce began to speak again.

“My apologies for the delay,” the High Commander said, smiling benignly at the cameras. “My enemies have attempted one last desperate strike against the Empire, but as ever, they are doomed to fail. Their puny efforts cannot stand against Hydra once I unveil our grand new weapon. A weapon that will turn our enemies into smears of blood.”

Pierce began to laugh then, a chilling cackle that echoed off the stone. The sound made his audience pull friends and family closer, holding each other tight and looking fearfully at the sky outside. 

Few could be certain that their lives were safe. For who could honestly say that they had never had a moment's doubt about the rule of Hydra, barring those were members of the organization or had spent all their efforts on bootlicking flattery?

Yet while some families waited for Pierce's announcement with anticipation and others with a rising panic, all of them soon gasped in shock. For when the High Commander punched a code into the computer at his side, a hundred thousand drones took flight all across the globe. Their endless numbers blocked out the sun and stars above as Hydra prepared for genocide. 

However, before Pierce could enter Zola's algorithm, his highest general stepped forward and pressed a gun against his head.

“Don't move,” Fury ordered as the Empire watched on in astonishment, spinning Pierce around so that his hostage was between the agent and the rest of Hydra's men. “It's time for this to end.”

“Fury! What are you doing?” Pierce snarled, trying to twist around and grab his own gun off his belt. But the agent kneed him in the back and ripped the weapon from his hands. “I made you, you bastard. I trusted in your loyalty.”

“Then you're a fool. Did you never wonder _why_ I was so loyal? Why I sacrificed life and body for the man who had destroyed my family?” Fury's growl was barely audible, hissed into the ear of Hydra's leader as he kept a wary eye on the other generals in the room. “I sacrificed everything in order to bring your empire down.”

Watching Pierce die had been Fury's only goal for half a lifetime, vengeance sustaining him when hope and better sense had failed. Indeed, he would have shot the man already if he didn’t need a hostage and to be honest, Fury doubted that the threat to their High Commander would dissuade his enemies for long. Hydra's men were more likely to shoot through Pierce than try to save him and their patience would wear thin soon enough.

But Fury didn't need forever. He just needed time enough to shove Stark's flash drive into the High Commander’s console and let it do its work. 

Every member of SHIELD had been given one of these drives – Agent Thirteen smuggling in a box of them just a few hours before dawn – and the program they contained was supposed to shut down Zola's drones for good. However, while Fury wasn’t the sort of man to panic, he found himself at a loss when Stark’s drive didn’t seem to do a thing.

If SHIELD couldn't destroy Hydra's drones, then the other members of the Resistance would have died for nothing and Fury needed a backup plan right now. Deactivating Pierce's defense system would have been a good start, but the agent had spent too long acting on his own initiative. He considered the rest of SHIELD a resource to be used as necessary but never counted on and he didn't need Captain America to finish this for him. So Fury attacked, picking off two of Hydra’s generals before the rest managed to pin him and his hostage behind Pierce's massive desk. 

Solid oak and extravagantly pretentious, the wood soaked up bullets as though it was made for the purpose, but Fury couldn’t win this battle by hiding behind a piece of furniture. However, the agent had barely thought this before Pierce tried to escape, the man scrambling to his feet only to catch one of his generals’ bullets in his chest.

“Shit!” Fury growled as Pierce crumpled to the floor with a scream of agony. Then the agent fired a few more shots over the desk to keep his foes at bay. 

He had no intention of helping Pierce – honestly, he was just sorry that he hadn’t been the one to shoot him – but the loss of his hostage put him at a serious disadvantage. Hydra's generals would be able to flank him quickly once they actually began to work together; their mistrust of each other was the only thing that had saved his neck thus far. 

Of course, Fury still had a few tricks up his sleeve, or rather a few of Hydra's more exclusive weapons, and he had no intention of dying easily. He might be outnumbered but he hadn't gained his position by leading from the back and there was something to be said for old age and treachery. 

Indeed, Second General Wagner died in seconds when a poison dart landed in his jugular and a precisely thrown knife took another of his comrades down. Fury had to duck back as General Chastain let fly a few daggers of his own but one of the shockers that the Black Widow had made famous soon put stop to that. 

Yet the agent's luck couldn’t hold forever and after General Müller managed to wing him in the shoulder, the tide began to turn. 

He was bleeding in half a dozen places when Hydra’s surviving generals finally cornered him and if they hadn’t stopped to gloat, Fury would have died. But Müller couldn’t resist a few witty one-liners, his smug monologue interrupted by an echoing clang as a brightly painted shield flew across the room. The missile slammed into the general and knocked him off his feet before being caught on the rebound by Captain America.

It had taken the captain this long to fight his way through Hydra's soldiers, a score of men left broken and bleeding in his wake. But despite the lateness of his arrival, Captain America had always had good timing and with his help, Fury soon won victory.

A violent bloody victory and Steve quickly grew uncomfortable when the other agent began to execute their prisoners. Although he had killed people himself, this seemed different and the captain stopped Fury before he could murder the last man in cold blood. 

“Not like this,” Steve said. “We don’t need to kill him now.”

The agent wasn't happy but he wasn’t going to argue with Captain America, particularly not when the other man had stopped him in full view of Pierce's cameras. So Fury put away his weapon and tied their prisoner's hands together while Steve flipped the switch on the fortress' defense system.

Then the two men stood waiting for SHIELD’s other agents to arrive. They would need Iron Man to disable the drones if the program on his drive wasn't working and the captain didn't want to risk triggering an attack by accident. 

However, Stark was taking his time and Steve was seriously considering leaving the room to go find Bucky when he noticed that Pierce's broadcasting equipment was still on. At least, he thought so considering all the blinking lights on Hydra's cameras and once he saw that, Steve couldn't walk away.

All he could think about was the innocents who had been watching Fury’s fight with Hydra and he needed them to know that they didn't have to be afraid. 

“Hello, everyone. My name is Steve Rogers but most people call me Captain America,” the soldier said, stepping up to the cameras and smiling a little awkwardly. Steve didn't know if anyone was still watching or if they'd even understand him, but the captain had to try. “I don’t know if you've heard of me but I grew up before the Day of Fire and while things were far from perfect, life was much better than your books have made it seem. Most of us weren't rich but we had the chance to dream and to question in a way that Hydra won't allow.

“SHIELD and the other Resistance groups aren't fighting Hydra for power or because we want to rule you; we’re fighting because something is very wrong with the world we’re living in. I have to believe you know this, that you haven't been blind to the way that Hydra tries to own you and slaughters without cause. So while I’m sorry that you had to see-”

Captain America’s speech cut off as he suddenly lurched forward, a bloom of red appearing in the star upon his chest. One spot and then another and those watching his broadcast stared in shock as he slowly crumpled out of sight. They watched and they did nothing; if Steve Rogers had been hoping to convince his audience to join the revolution then he had failed utterly.

Perhaps if the captain had had more time, he would have won them over but the habits of a lifetime were difficult to break.

So the world watched Steve fall and did not lift a finger, no cry of outrage heard when Pierce limped back into view. After all, everyone knew that Hydra could not be defeated and to try was suicide. Who would mourn one foolish stranger when their family members could die at any moment and the only way to live with that was to make all feeling numb?

Only Pierce could afford to care and right now, Hydra’s commander only cared about punishing his enemies. He was going torture Fury for his betrayal until the agent begged for mercy and then he was going to skin the man alive. He was going to break the Resistance once and for all and the first step had been making them watch their legend die.

However, Pierce had barely opened his mouth to gloat when a black-clad blur slammed into his side. The Winter Soldier didn’t bother with fancy techniques or special weapons; he just beat Pierce's head in until the man stopped breathing and then stumbled toward his captain with panic in his eyes.

“Steve! Please, Stevie, you have to be all right,” Bucky whispered, heedless of the blood that soaked his hands. But there was nothing to be done, nothing left to save of the man that he had loved. 

All he could do was curl around Steve's body with a desperate moan, pressing his face against his lover’s cheek and hoping desperately. But there would be no miracle this time. Bucky would never again see his fellow's stupid smile or lean up to kiss the annoyance off his face. Steve would never see the house by the sea that he had so dearly wanted; there would be no long and lazy mornings once the world was free at last.

The soldier wanted to howl with grief but he couldn’t even cry, his voice strangled to silence with his shame. Because Bucky should have stopped this; he should have been there to stop this and he would never forgive himself for letting Steve slip away.

The Winter Soldier had yet to move when the rest of his squad burst into the room a few seconds later and then stumbled to a halt at the sight that met their eyes. None of them could believe it, not even the Black Widow, because something about Captain America had always seemed invincible. Indeed, the sergeant's squad mourned with him, but for all their skill at killing, SHIELD's agents were not good at consolation and no one wanted to interrupt the Winter Soldier's grief.

So Ghost patched up Fury while the rest of the squad took care of Hydra’s corpses and the Black Widow walked over to Pierce’s console to see what she could do. If Stark's program wasn't working, perhaps she could manage to shut down the drones herself. However, the agent had barely touched a single button before the computer lit up on its own.

“I have control of the drones,” a voice announced to the room at large. “I am ready to deactivate them as per my protocol.”

Everyone turned to stare at the console in shock, eyes widening as the face of Stark's AI slowly appeared on screen. In the chaos of battle, Fury had never removed SHIELD’s flash drive from the computer and he hadn't known that it was working exactly as intended after all. Stark had known that he couldn't hope to anticipate every one of Hydra's defenses and so he had made a different plan instead. 

He had loaded every flash drive with a version of SHIELD's AI instead of any single program, one that could seek out the weaknesses in Zola’s drones and gain control in time. However, before the AI could neutralize Hydra’s drones as it had stated, the Winter Soldier stirred.

“Don't!” the sniper shouted. “Don't shut them down!”

His eyes were wild as he pushed himself to his feet and staggered toward the console, his voice thick with grief and rage. None of the other agents stopped him. No one could bring themselves to try when his sorrow was too raw to be soothed by words of comfort and standard platitudes.

“Please, we need the drones now. I need to make this right,” Bucky pleaded, hands gripping the console hard enough to dent the sides. “Zola's equation was meant to give the drones their targets and now I want you to reverse it. Let his work kill Hydra for us; let Hydra's members pay the price for all the blood they've spilled.”

“Yes, sir,” the AI answered after a short pause and although he was not built to have emotions, his audience could have sworn that they heard reluctance in his voice. But before any of the other agents thought to object, Stark's AI did as the Winter Soldier ordered, Zola's drones buzzing into life.

And Hydra died.

All over the world, the drones locked onto their targets and struck with deadly accuracy. In America, Rumlow was the first to perish, a bullet piercing through his heart just as he broke through the Mad Circus' last barrier. So too were the survivors of Rocinha rescued from their standoff, the rebels' enemies dropping like puppets with cut strings. 

It was the same everywhere that Hydra had ruled the hearts of men and women and soon the very earth was bathed in blood. This was a slaughter, pure and simple; there was no defense against the death that Zola had created and the Winter Soldier had unleashed. 

And when the carnage was finished, when every member of Hydra was lying dead and broken, then the drones turned their sights on the only evils left.

The machines attacked each other on the Winter Soldier’s order, lit up the sky with fire and explosions, and the bullets only stopped when every gun ran dry. Only then did the shell-shocked survivors venture from their houses, staring up at empty skies and the wreckage on the streets. 

The members of the Resistance were the first to recover, gathering their composure in order to see their mission through. However, in Pierce's central chamber there was only silence until Tony Stark burst into the room.

“What did you do, Barnes?” Stark asked when he saw the sniper standing at Pierce's console, the thunder of a million bullets still ringing in his ears.

“I ended it,” the Winter Soldier answered plainly before returning to his captain's side. “Hydra murdered Steve, shot him in the back like some kind of dog and I would kill them ten times over if I could. So string me up from the rafters if you like; I don't give a damn.”

And Stark did; he had no other choice. 

The Resistance had fought and died for a new world, a better world, and its leaders couldn't allow such butchery to stand. Those who'd lost a friend or family member needed to blame someone for their sorrow and the Winter Soldier had left no one else alive. 

Thus, one of the first actions of the provisional world government was to try James Buchanan Barnes for war crimes in an open court of law.

The sniper didn't say anything in his own defense; he never even removed the mask that he had worn in battle and when he was found guilty, it was seen as a triumph of diplomacy over violence and cruelty in the name of any cause. Indeed, the Winter Soldier became as much of a symbol as Captain America over the course of his trial, James Barnes representing the darkness that lived within men's hearts even as Steve Rogers was turned into a martyr once again.

The people needed a hero to inspire them during the long years of recovery just as they needed a villain on whom to hang all evil and Captain America had been born to fill those shoes. The Resistance built a monument to his sacrifice on the site where he had perished and his mausoleum soon became a place of pilgrimage.

No one ever guessed that the grave at its heart was empty, as empty as that believed to hold the Winter Soldier's corpse.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry; so very sorry. I didn't know this fic was going to end like this when I started it.  
> And at some point, you may actually get the betaed version.


	7. Time

There was a man living in the old house on the hilltop, the one that had survived the Days of Fire and of Blood. He came into Brooklyn once a week to buy supplies but he did not talk to anyone and one look into his eyes was enough to freeze the villagers mid-word. For there was sorrow in his gaze; such sorrow as only the eldest of their town had ever known.

Only the eldest remembered the days of war and Hydra, the smothering taste of fear that had seeped through all their lives. That generation remembered the grief of losing family members to midnight raids or random cruelty and yet some of them actually seemed to miss the past as well.

Life had been uncomplicated under Hydra – you did not have to think, you only had to follow – and they were unused to making decisions for themselves. Indeed, many of these men and women decided to drink and fight and wait for the world to return to tyranny even as the younger generation began to thrive instead. So much had been stifled when Pierce was High Commander and while the long struggle of the recovery had made weak hearts despair, the young saw opportunity.

Those who had grown up without Hydra enjoyed being free to do as they wanted, free to criticize Premier Pott's decisions on education and Stark's latest adventure into supposedly helpful technology. They enjoyed being able to love where their hearts led and argue without killing, the streets no longer painted red when one of Hydra’s strike teams wanted to test out their new guns.

Things were better now even if they were also harder and the post-war generation just shook their heads dismissively when someone said otherwise. There was no point in arguing with their elders when the words were wrong but harmless and no one ever thought differently in Brooklyn until the night that Monsieur Chastain drank too much.

“Those sniveling Resistance fighters should have let Hydra put them in the ground where they belonged,” Chastain claimed loudly in the village inn that evening, a few too many shots of whiskey in his cup. “They spent the whole war hiding in the shadows and now they want to change everything as though they have the right. What did the Resistance ever do but make my life more difficult? They should have left the government to those who knew how to take care of their own.”

“Like Hydra did?” the voice was cold, the ice of winter and bitter storms washing over all who heard it, and though the words had not been spoken loudly, the entire inn fell silent nonetheless.

Because it was the man from the hilltop, the sorrow in his eyes replaced by a burning fury such as they had never seen before. “Hydra, who watched everyone and killed for their own amusement, who met criticism with death squads, and who did not need propaganda to sway you to their side. Because men like you had already convinced yourselves that this was normal and when the slaughter came again, you would have looked upon the bloodshed and said that it was justified. You make me _sick_. It makes me sick to think that anyone gave their life for you.”

With every word, the man stalked closer until Chastain was trapped against the wall. But the old drunkard had never been the type to back down from a fight when his blood was running hot. So instead of giving in, he just raised his chin and replied scornfully, “I didn’t ask them to. I liked my life the way it was and if some idiot chose to die to change things that doesn’t mean I have to thank them for their meddling.”

There was silence as the watching villagers gaped at the old man’s audacity and yet the man from the hilltop did not unleash the violence that simmered there beneath his skin.

He did not kill Chastain as the old drunkard half expected and any member of Hydra would have done. Instead the man threw back his head and started laughing and somehow this was far more horrible.

Because there was no mirth in the sound, only pain and desolation, and no one was supposed to sound that broken while they were still alive. But the villagers couldn't offer comfort, not to this stranger who was baring his heart before them and yet showing them their flaws.

“You’re right; it was a choice. It was their choice to fight even as it was your choice to do nothing and only God can judge which one was right,” the man said bitterly once his laughter finally died. “But next time you feel like talking about the glory days of Hydra, you had best be sure I'm not around. Otherwise, I might decide to kill you in trade for what I've lost. A bit more blood won’t make a difference now.”

He left then and he didn't return for weeks, the story spreading throughout the entire village over the time that he was gone. Sometimes Chastain himself would tell it, the old man trying to make it seem as though he had won that encounter and in some ways, perhaps he had. But the stranger had spoken to the hearts of all those watching and many of them had found themselves wanting afterward. So they wondered about the man who lived there on the hilltop, alone with his sorrow and the fury on his tongue.

Although, if any of the villagers had dared to venture closer, they would have discovered that the stranger was not as friendless as they thought. For there was a woman, a redheaded woman who came to visit once or twice a year.

She would bring a bottle of the finest whiskey and a bitter smile, the two of them trading glasses back and forth until the alcohol ran dry. Only then would the stranger talk; he spoke his sorrow to her ears as he would to no other living soul because she listened without judgment and then held him as he cried. She could not judge him when her hands were just as scarlet and in her arms the man found a brief respite from the grief that bowed his shoulders, the weight he carried through every waking moment and too often in his dreams.

The stranger didn't sleep much anymore; his evenings spent on the hilltop beneath a sea of endless stars. Yet he was not alone despite the loneliness within him; he could not be alone as long as he was still alive. The man would never be free from the shadow of his failures, his shame embodied by the grave that he had dug on the night that he arrived.

The man spent many an evening sitting by the gravestone that marked the body of his captain, his best friend, and the one love of his life. The only love that his heart would ever carry and sometimes he wondered if he should simply end it all. But the stranger had made a promise when he brought his lover home to Brooklyn; he had promised and he would not break this vow as well.

So the man wished his captain goodnight every evening, pressing a gentle kiss to the headstone before walking back inside. He left behind a plain marble marker on the hilltop, the grey stone carved with three short lines:

 _Steven G. Rogers_  
1918-2012  
He was not expendable.

 

Finis

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic turned out way more depressing than I expected. Though I suppose it is my dystopia AU for a reason.

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: Major character death, violence (possibly more than canon, hard to say), several counts of genocide, and a lot of angst.


End file.
